The Death of 3-D by Michael Clark

At around this same time a year ago, about the only people bemoaning the state of 3-D feature films with regularity were film critics. In the wake of “Avatar,” the highest grossing motion picture of all-time, every major studio girded their loins and chose to fully embrace the technology that would supposedly cure all of their economic ills. There was just enough box office return to legitimize the huge gamble, and the numbers of audiences warming up to 3-D continued to increase, albeit at a snail’s pace. What none of these short-term memory studios considered was the history of this seemingly jinxed format and its checkered past.

A year later, paying audiences – the ultimate jurors and the lifeblood of the movie industry – are starting to grumble louder and are avoiding 3-D releases in increasingly larger numbers. The techno-geeks, the ones paying upwards to 30 percent more per ticket, are enamored with the process from the get-go, are more than happy to part with their disposable income and would pay to see anything in 3-D. For Mr. and Mrs. Joe Lunchbox and their 2.5 children, the extra cost simply can’t be justified. Many of them cite what critics have been saying for a long while now: watching a 3-D movie is a largely trying and unpleasant experience.

Apart from director James Cameron, the guy behind “Avatar,” no filmmaker until recently had anything positive to say about 3-D. Directors of 3-D movies that came out after “Avatar” stated (almost all of them anonymously and/or off the record) that they had been pressured by the studio footing the bill to use 3-D … whether they liked it or not. Not since the advent of the talkie had so many creative types voiced such opposition to an art-based technology.

This force-fisted dictate on the part of short-sighted studio suits lead to a string of box office and critical disappointments including but not limited to: “The Last Airbender,” “Clash of the Titans,” “Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore,” “Piranha 3D,” “My Soul to Take,” “Gulliver’s Travels” and “The Green Hornet.” In addition to tanking, all of these films were filmed in 2-D and converted to 3-D in post-production, lending them an even more artificial look and making them more of a chore to watch. “Alice in Wonderland” was the only one of these conversion films that was both a box office and critical success, but even its success comes with a caveat. Although the 3-D edition of “Alice” made more money, more people chose to watch it in 2-D. Like bankers during the housing bust, studio bean counters mistook quantity for quality and started believing their own twisted logic. It was built but they did not come; at least in the numbers they had wanted.

The future of live-action 3-D got a huge boost in 2010 when four filmmaking legends announced separately that their next projects would be in 3-D: Martin Scorsese (“Hugo”), Steven Spielberg (“The Adventures of Tintin”), Werner Herzog (“Caves of Forgotten Dreams”) and Ridley Scott (“Prometheus”). Studio executives sighed, cheered and danced a jig while film critics (me included) decided to wait and give the technology another year to prove itself and legitimize its existence.

As Herzog’s beautifully shot film was an art-house documentary, you can’t hold its poor box office performance against it. As of January 11, “Tintin” had done over $330 million world wide, but only around 20 percent of that was earned in the US. It should be noted that “Tintin” was based on an age-old Belgian comic strip that never caught fire in the US.

“Hugo,” my favorite movie of 2011, cost roughly $150 million to make and has done only $64 million thus far. About 80 percent of the gross came domestically, but it too is based on story set in Europe. Was it the non-US setting that killed these films or is it the audiences’ escalating apathy?

Scott’s movie doesn’t come out until July, but he is already on record as saying he’ll never make another 2-D movie again after seeing the capabilities 3-D offers. Let’s see if Scott feels the same way if “Prometheus” fails to make a healthy profit (its budget has been reported to be as high as $250 million). Like “Avatar,” “Prometheus” is sci-fi action flick (and a prequel of sorts to Scott’s “Alien”) and should delight the highly desired 18-25 year-old space-nerd male demographic, lovingly referred to as “fanboys.”

Back to “Hugo.”  You might wonder why I would pick it as my favorite movie of the year since I detest 3-D so much. Truth be told, I have few gripes regarding the 3-D technology … provided it’s handled with care by people (Cameron, Scorsese, Herzog) who know what they’re doing AND that it’s part of the production process from its inception. My problem is that it’s being applied in post-production without any kind of forethought by people whose principal concern is milking the audience dry rather than delivering a superior film. The studios are force-feeding it to consumers for the sole purpose of artificially inflating ticket prices and to theater chains that have no choice but to purchase very expensive projection equipment that could be antiquated before it’s even paid for in full. And doing all of this during one of the worst economic stretches most of us have ever experienced only adds insult to injury.

Someone else who knows what they’re doing with 3-D is DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg. Having headed that studios’ animation wing since its start in 1994, Katzenberg made big news in 2008 by declaring that all future feature-length animated DreamWorks movies would be presented in 3-D. With the lone exception of the (2-D) “Road to Eldorado,” all of DreamWorks 23 animated films have landed in the black with its six 3-D productions generating the highest percentage of profit. So, what does Katzenberg know that other studio chiefs don’t? Not much really.

What Katzenberg (and John Lasseter of Pixar) realized early on is that 3-D is a perfect fit for animation. Because the visuals are drawn (either by hand or by computer) the images can be manipulated without limitation and they look perfect all of the time – something live-action movies can never do. That’s why “Avatar” looked so good. Yes, it used human actors that provided the motion-capture blueprints but the bulk of the film’s visuals were created from scratch on equipment Cameron had designed specifically for that film. If Cameron had lavished the same kind of meticulous attention to his derivative, just so-so screenplay, “Avatar” would have been a hands-down classic instead of what it is now: a technical marvel with a weak story. I referred to it in my original review as “Pocahontas” meets “Dances with Wolves” in outer-space.

There are huge issues facing the movie industry right now regarding 3-D, a couple with easy solutions, the others not so much.

The first thing the theater chains need to do (with co-op financial support from the studios) is to stop overcharging audiences to see 3-D movies. If the live-action titles were as uniformly excellent as their animated counterparts, paying more for most people wouldn’t be an issue. But they’re not. Most of them are slapped together after the fact, and not only do they look bad, they frequently make viewers ill with motion sickness via skewed and artificially altered depth-perception.

Number two: stop manipulating 2-D into 3-D, especially with years-old titles most fans of these films already own on DVD or Blu-ray. Cameron was an early conversion opponent but has since changed his tune. His next release is a 2-D to 3-D version of “
Titanic.” So much for innovation.

 In addition to “Prometheus,” there will be 31 major studio 3-D releases in 2012 and this is great news … for fanboys. “Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace” (probably the worst title in the double trilogy) is the highest profile back-catalogue title. The bulk of the remainder includes mostly action/adventure, horror and animated titles including, and I’m not making this up, “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.” Ahem.

For non-fanboys, the pickings are slim (which is probably a good thing in the long run) and they’re all slated for December release. “Life of Pi” is director Ang Lee’s adaptation of the Yann Martel novel and “The Hobbit: The Unexpected Journey” is the first installment in Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” prequel trilogy.
The most interesting title of the bunch has to be “The Great Gatsby” from whiz-bang Australian director Baz Luhrmann. Hopefully it will be less like his last film – the sleep-inducing clunker “Australia” and more like his crackling “Romeo + Juliet” and “Moulin Rouge!” It was shot in 3-D and stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Toby Maguire and will either be a spectacular success or an impossible-to-look-away-from train-wreck.

Studios and filmmakers also have to start being more selective about which movies they make that could significantly benefit from a 3-D presentation. In the case of “Hugo,” the decision to go 3-D was a wise one on paper and it looks great and might even win some Oscars. But it’s also going to lose a boatload of money. This will also loosen the screws somewhat on the theater chains that are investing money they don’t have on equipment with an iffy shelf life. It’s becoming more clear that the market for these films lies mostly in action and animation.

The studios also need to consider what’s taking place outside of the theaters. Not only do people have a practically endless supply of where they can spend their entertainment dollars, they now have the option of watching 3-D in their own living rooms. While still too costly for most, 3-D home entertainment systems are going to continue to go down in price while the quality steadily increases. It wouldn’t be going out on limb to predict that within the next five years, most US households will have 3-D systems. Add to that the industry’s regular practice of releasing titles on DVD and (2-D and 3-D) Blu-ray mere months after the start of their theatrical runs, and you’re sinking your own ship before it even leaves the docks. Impatient studios’ that cannibalize their own productions results in a more frugal, discerning and patient consumer.

The big question for movie fans who could fully embrace 3-D under the right conditions is also the one without a clear-cut answer. Considering how much money can be made – and conversely how much can be lost – why is it so hard to make a truly good-looking live-action 3-D movie? In order to do it right (“Hugo,” “Avatar”) you have to sink boatloads of cash into the budget and most studios just aren’t willing to do so in this tenuous economic climate. They’ll have to wait until human talent can line up with the technology, and based on history, that could be a long, long time.

For those under the age of 30, this current 3-D wave is the first they’ve ever seen of the medium, and like email, texting, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, they consider it a new creation that’s still crawling and just needs a little time to iron out the kinks. For those of us a tad older, we’ve seen the 3-D fad come and go before, some of us more than once.

If you don’t think it’s a fad, consider this: the initial technology for 3-D was invented in 1890 by British film pioneer William Freise-Greene. The first time an audience paid to see a 3-D movie (“The Power of Love”) in a theater was on September 27, 1922 using the anaglyphic image projection method. This is the process where rose and cyan color images are offset on the screen from two projectors, and the 3-D appears while the viewer wears cardboard glasses with thin red and green plastic “lenses.”

The anaglyphic presentation went through several fits and starts before “improvements” via the “natural vision” camera rig were made in the early ‘50s. Studios began releasing more movies, the majority of the titles being B-grade horror flicks and virtually all of them were 2-D to 3-D conversions. If 3-D was so great, why didn’t studios and directors use it for their “prestige” titles? The closest 3-D ever got to respectability was when Alfred Hitchcock used natural vision (under studio pressure of course) for “Dial M for Murder.” By the time the movie was released in 1954, it was shown in 2-D because the demand for 3-D was too low to warrant the additional distribution costs. It wasn’t even seen in 3-D until the ‘80s, and then it was only at film festivals.

Every couple years, there would be an intermittent crush of titles and then another lull and by 1989 everyone regarded 3-D as officially dead.

The first indicator that 3-D may again be on its way out yet again came last summer with the release of “Kung Fu Panda 2” and “Cars 2” whose box office takes from 3-D were only 45 and 37 percent respectively. That is a far cry from the 60 percent ratio enjoyed by “Shrek Forever After” just a year earlier. Add to that heap the “Tintin” and “Hugo” receipts and it doesn’t take a math genius to figure out in what direction all of this is headed.

This isn’t an obituary or a proclamation or even a wish. I want 3-D to succeed in a big way. I hate to keep harping on “Hugo” but it really is the only (mostly) live-action 3-D movie ever made to fully utilize this medium to its maximum potential. If the studios can find a way to produce quality films, and do it with artistic dignity and in a manner that isn’t financially suspect, I’m all for it. In this era of the dying print medium, my future as a film critic is largely dependent on the 3-D medium succeeding.

This coming year will likely decide the future of 3-D once and for all. If one too many 3-D titles (pay extra close attention to “Prometheus” and “The Amazing Spider-man”) fail to deliver big returns, or just break even, more high-profile directors will abstain from making them, and 3-D might not be able to dodge any more bullets.
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Michael Clark, Longtime “Oz” contributor Michael Clark has written for over 50 national and international publications and has completed three screenplays. Since 1996, he has been the sole film critic for the Gwinnett Daily Post and has just finished his first novel.