8/14/11

I still remember the day, with the newly-constructed Great Escape Harrisburg Mall 14 bringing digital projection to the Harrisburg market for the first time, settling in for my very first movie in the RealD digital 3D format. Beowulf was a bit of a mess on a lot of levels, but MAN it was something to look at.  Water, mirrors and shiny shields held reflections deeper and more realistic than anything we'd ever seen.  Characters lined up from back to front of a fully dimensional space like figures in a pop-up book.  And director Robert Zemeckis was not afraid to stick swords and spears in your face or stage a climax where his hero dangles by a rope from a flying dragon while the tops of trees smack him and, by extension, us.  While we'd been led to believe 3D wouldn't really arrive until what was then a showdown between Monsters vs. Aliens and Avatar to be the first film in the format to see nationwide release, turns out a lot of other titles managed to jump the gun.  The amazing concert flick U2 3D and the horror remake My Bloody Valentine gave us early looks at just how amazing live action could be in the format, and, while it was tough for any 3D release to claim any significant number of screens while theaters slowly but surely crunched the numbers to decide if it was worth investing in those digital projectors, movies like The Final Destination and Bolt reinforced the idea that digital 3D had a lot to offer.  MvA was indeed a trip, and Avatar finally arrived to break all box office records and announce that the era of 2D movies was at an end.

Or, was it?

You'd have been forgiven if you thought the next big 3D blockbuster, Alice in Wonderland, was a bit less special-looking than those that came before it.  Disney's big-budget Tim Burton spectacle was a great movie, but the studio managed to print a whole lot of extra money by running it through a 3D conversion process that took a film that hadn't been shot with 3D cameras and make it work like one that had.  It was muddy and lacked definition or memorable effects, but caught up in the hype of the moment, we all assumed the process had had a bad day or that Burton simply hadn't made good use of it, oblivious to this whole "conversion" thing.  But Warner Bros. couldn't hide the fact that they'd already run trailers for their Clash of the Titans remake that made no mention of 3D before deciding to cash in by hastily converting the film.  So, while you can argue that Clash wasn't really worse than many of the 3D conversions we'd seen before or since, we KNEW what was happening and we didn't like it.  But we still SAW it, and so WB plowed forward with an ambitious plan to convert just about every blockbuster they had in the pipeline and other studios followed suit.  The couple years that followed have seen an ever-escalating number of 3D titles on an ever-escalating number of screens.  And yet, as the Glee 3D concert movie flops hard this weekend as the rare film not showing on a single 2D screen anywhere in America, can we agree that 3D fatigue has set in in a really big way?  Not that I don't still pine to get that specialness back; believe me, I do.  But there's no doubt as one watches reports that movies showing on 70% 3D screens are making 60% of their money on 2D ones that the worm has turned.  International audiences are still hip-deep in their 3D honeymoon, but if nothing changes, that golden goose will be dead before long, leaving theater owners stuck with some fancy projectors and no content to show with them.

What's to be done?  Glad you asked:

1)Educate the audience... and yourselves:  almost every seat at a 2D movie is a good seat for a certain kind of moviegoer.  Some of us like to sit near the screen, some far from it.  Some near the middle of the theater, some off to the side.  In the end, any given packed house is going to include only a handful of ticket buyers who wish they'd gotten to sit in a different part of the theater and they can all still see the movie.  Not so with 3D, where only a small window of seats in the middle of the auditorium allow for optimum interraction between your eyes, those glasses and the screen.  I recently saw Captain America:  The First Avenger from the top row of a crowded theater, an experience not dissimilar to being given vertigo for two hours.  It's time for the movie business to stop denying this simple fact and to promote to ticket buyers that they really want to seek out those good seats before it's too late.  And by the same token, theater owners have to give their largest auditoriums to first-run 3D movies.  It's OK to only have about 20 good seats for a movie that's been out for a couple months.  For one of the weekend's top releases, the biggest auditoriums are necessary to maximize the number of seats that allow you to actually see the movie.  And the studios need to embrace the practice Michael Bay created for Transformers:  Dark of the Moon and make brighter prints for their 3D releases, so once you're done looking at them through tinted 3D glasses, the resulting image is just as bright as a regular movie.
2)No more surcharges:  Cowboys and Aliens cost an estimated 170 million dollars to produce. Beginners cost 3 million.  When I buy a ticket to both movies, those tickets cost the same amount.  There's no "special effects and movie stars" surcharge.  Why should there be one for glasses you're expected to give back after the showing?  For 3D to lure people to the theaters, you have to give up the fantasy that they're happy to pay extra for the priviledge of being lured.  Especially for 2nd-tier titles, the fact that 3D movies cost more without, in many cases, delivering more has actually served as box office repellent.  Used and marketed properly, 3D will sell more tickets, but not more tickets that are, in some cases, $5.00 more than the ones for everything else that's showing.
3)Get me some cool glasses, stat!:  We heard a lot early in the 3D process about the notion that frequent moviegoers would have the option to purchase their own glasses, with fun, sturdier designs and the chance for the germaphobe to avoid having to wear glasses that were at some point on somebody else's head.  I've seen promotions where people who turned out for the midnight showings of movies like Saw:  The Final Chapter or Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 got commemorative glasses, which is certainly nice, but a quick web search revealed only these sunglasses-like 3D glasses similar enough to what you get in the theater that they really only help the people with the glasses-sharing issues (I suppose you could call bringing and wearing your own glasses marginally "green", since you spare the theater the trouble of having to get your glasses recycled).  A friend of mine who used to work at a movie theater assured me that wearing these outside of the movies would fry my retinas, so they don't have any other applications.  Cool glasses, people.  Get cracking.
4)No more conversions!:  James Cameron and George Lucas, Hollywood's two reigning masters of technology, have been hard at work converting their pre-3D masterpieces Titanic and Star Wars for the format, which will be a test of whether anyone can produce an even halfway decent process to convert existing films is possible (seems unlikely, although the usual din of idiots proclaiming that reissues of old 3D movies will replace production on new ones will undoubtedly rise for a couple days).  But the fact is that we've all had so much money stolen by bad 3D conversions that I just don't want to hear the word any more.  If the filmmaker doesn't want to use the 3D cameras, fine, that's his artistic choice.  But saying "No problem, we'll clean it up in post" is absurd.  It's like shooting your movies in black and white and trotting out the old Ted Turner colorization technology to get them ready for release.  Just.  Say.  No.
5)Get directors onboard:  One of the reasons Avatar is the definitive 3D blockbuster is because nobody told James Cameron he had to make his movie in 3D, he decided to do it that way and told theaters they had to upgrade their projectors to show it.  Patrick Lussier went from journeyman direct-to-video director to genre visionary when 3D debuted:  his work on Valentine and Drive Angry shows him to be the first director whose work reaches new heights when he can scan the frame for crap to thow at the viewers.  David R. Ellis' work on The Final Destination showed he knew exactly what to do with the format, and I'm excited to see what he'll have for me on Labor Day with his new 3D flick Shark Night.  If Zemeckis could make live-action flicks with the same visual imagination he brought to those doomed motion-capture animated flicks, that would be pretty awesome.  But most of the filmmakers who've been forced to work with or near 3D (all those "we planned this to be in 3D, even if we didn't actually use the cameras" stories/lies we heard from this summer's blockbuster directors) haven't shown much interest in doing anything with the technology.  Rob Marshall called working with the 3D cameras on Pirates of the Caribbean:  On Stranger Tides a logistical nightmare, which must have been made worse by the fact that he composed exactly one shot that played differently in 3D than it would have in 2D.  If the filmmakers have no creative interest in using the format, telling them they have to because you can charge more for tickets is the very definition of cutting your own throat.
6)Trailers!:  I don't know how long it takes to get the 3D effects done in post-production as opposed to 2D, but I am astonished by how rare it is to see a 3D trailer for a movie that's gonna be in 3D.  Frankly, with so many 3D movies in play, there should be no 2D trailers before 3D movies, and that goes double for movies that are gonna come out in 3D.  At least half a dozen times, I saw the Transformers trailer in 2D before a 3D movie this year, and in the end, the actual 3D version of the trailer was only released a couple weeks before the movie came out.  If you want to convince people your 3D effects are worth the money, how about showing them an actual trailer?

So, there's my plan.  Get to work, studios:  3D is awesome, stop screwing it up.