Warner Bros. plans to saturate the market with 3D
Warner Bros. plans to saturate the market with 3D
Mar 19
The descent into gimmicky 3D has officially begun. Again. This time for real. Warner Bros., the studio behind the Harry Potter and current Batman franchises (among others) is planning to release all its ‘tentpole’ (studio-speak for effects-heavy crowd-pleasing stuff like superhero flicks) movies in 3D. There are 5 of them coming out this year, and another 11 next year. Woe betide the happles Harry fan prone to motion sickness or migraines. Alan Horn made the announcement at this year’s ShoWest. I guess the mighty Avatar has a lot to answer for here, seeing as it raked in huge wads of cash despite being almost exclusively screened in 3D. The market model might seem sound, but the artistic reasons behind WB’s decision to release everything in 3D are a little muddled.
Avatar was actually shot in 3D — you know, with a dual-lens camera that records two images from slightly different perspectives which are overlaid and filtered to create the 3D effect in that little grey mushy thing in your skull — a true stereoscopic image. WB has decided that to save time or money or something it’s going to convert all its tentpole films into 3D in post-production. This is a painstaking process that takes at least three months to complete, and it involves 3D artists going through every single shot in the film and mapping flat images to 3D models and then separating all the layers into different planes.
The result is noticeably different from true 3D. Some layers and characters stand apart from each other like cardboard cut-outs, true depth in scenes is hard to replicate, and CGI elements always come off looking more 3D than their live-action counterparts. I’ve seen this in action a couple of times — I caught glimpses of A Nightmare Before Christmas in its 3D re-release, and it looked more like the 3D team had just separated fore-, mid- and background from each other and put them in three separate flat planes. This doesn’t look very 3D. I caught the latest Harry Potter (number … 6?) in its Imax run, and was therefore treated to the first thirteen minutes in post-produced 3D, and the result was similarly underwhelming. The best bit of the whole 13-minute segment was seeing how far actors’ noses stick out in real life.
What films are going to be converted into 3D in this manner, you ask? Well, Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows Parts 1 and 2; the third Nolan / Bale Batman film; the as-yet unconfirmed Superman reboot; next month’s The Clash Of The Titans; Final Destination 5; and any number of other DC projects including The Green Lantern and The Flash. WB has stated that they’re keen to fill the Harry Potter void with lots of comic book adaptations, and it’s about time they stepped up in answer to Marvel’s disconcertingly frequent level of output; you can bet that any and all of these will also ship in the third dimension.
So it looks like James Cameron’s plan to bring real 3D to a cinema near you has backfired: instead of filmmakers planning to shoot their next flick with 3D cameras, thereby altering the very nature of the craft, we’re getting studio-mandated post-facto sub-par 3D conversions in a transparent effort to grab money and ride Avatar‘s coattails in the general direction of the bank. If the industry wants 3D to stick around this time, they have to do it right, they have to do it Cameron’s way.
On the plus side, maybe public reaction will be sufficiently negative for this whole 3D movement to get canned before it takes off. Wouldn’t that be nice?
