They don’t make ’em like that any more: 3D movies
I’ll watch anything in 3D. I even enjoyed The Phantom Menace in 3D and, frankly, the 3D effects were the only good thing about that movie. Around 2015 I thought about converting my home A/V set-up for 3D. I already had a wall-sized screen and seven-channel sound, but I didn’t have 3D. I’m kind-of glad I didn’t, though – by 2015 the golden age of 3D movies was already over, though we didn’t know it at the time. Perhaps we should have guessed – this wasn’t the first time 3D had exploded with a fanfare onto our screens, and the previous time it hadn’t stuck around long.
But, no: in 2015 everybody thought that 3D was the future of the movie industry, the one thing that could save it from the inexorable rise of streaming television. Studios were tripping over themselves to throw new 3D releases into cinemas, and cinema-goers were yumming them up. Movie studios and cinemas glommed onto 3D because it offered something that television could not – well, not easily, anyway.
But right now my local movie theatre, which has twenty screens, is not showing a single 3D movie. It’s two years since it screened a 3D release that I wanted to watch.
So what happened? How did a technology that everybody told us was going to be the salvation of the movie industry fail so comprehensively, so quickly?
An obvious limitation was that not everybody liked 3D. A substantial number of viewers said it gave them a headache, or made them nauseous. I never had that experience, but my wife did. I can fully understand that, if you go to the cinema to be entertained, you’re not going to be happy if you’re nauseated instead. I find the special 3D glasses a minor nuisance, but I’m used to wearing spectacles, so the extra weight on my nose isn’t all that annoying. For some people, I guess, it might be.
A more substantive problem, though, was that in their rush to produce 3D movies, studios often didn’t make them very well. Relatively few movies were produced with a full 3D workflow: more often they were filmed with conventional 2D equipment, and then converted. Phantom Menace was actually a 3D conversion of the original 2D movie, which had been released ten years earlier. It wasn’t a great conversion, either; it had a distinctly ‘layered’ look, like a kid’s pop-up book. Many of the fast action sequences worked well enough, but I get the impression that the studio didn’t really know what to do with the slower, dialogue scenes. To be fair, such scenes don’t really benefit much from a 3D presentation, but scenes still have to be rendered in 3D if it’s a 3D movie.
And then there was the cost. To get a natural 3D effect, studios had to use specialist equipment, like James Cameron’s Fusion Camera System that gave us the Avatar movies. And, um… Yogi Bear. This kind of equipment is expensive and requires specialist operators, as well as more sophisticated and time-consuming editing and post-production. This expense was passed on to consumers and, by 2015, we cinema-goers were starting to feel we’d seen it all before. It wasn’t clear to me now, and still isn’t, whether Yogi Bear needed full 3D. To be fair, the ‘Jellystone’ scenery was very impressive in 3D, but it doesn’t really add much to the overall presentation. If you don’t find a gluttonous, talking bear funny in 2D, you’re probably not going to laugh when he’s in 3D, either. But showing his antics in 3D added to the ticket price.
Eventually, cinema-goers started to feel that seeing objects flying towards them out of the screen was getting a bit passé, particularly when it made a night at the movies more expensive. It was even a little irritating, that the studios planned movies around opportunities to use these gimmicks, rather than the development of the story.
We should have predicted this. It turns out that the rise and fall of 3D technology between 2010 and 2020 echoed the similar trajectory that it followed between 1950 and 1960, and for similar reasons. As now, studios were seeking ways to distance themselves from television. The technologies they used to create 3D movies in the 50s weren’t all that different from the ones we use today – except that they’d had to film in 3D: the computer technology needed to convert a 2D production to 3D wasn’t available at that time.
In the 50s there were two main 3D technologies, both of which required the viewer to wear special glasses – as is the case today. Both these technologies have the effect that each of the viewer’s eyes sees an image filmed from a slightly different position. ‘Anaglyph’ technology worked using coloured filters, with images from two different viewpoints tinted in colour. ‘Polarization’ technology uses filters that pass light preferentially when it is polarized in a particular way, different for each viewpoint. Almost all modern 3D movies use polarization methods, although it’s possible now for cinemas to use a single, specialized projector that shows both polarizations in alternate frames. For this to work, there needs to be a filter that can switch polarities tens or hundreds of times each second, which is a relatively new development. Nevertheless, its the same basic principle, and the same customer experience: we’re still wearing glasses that show different images to each eye.
As in our more recent 3D boom, the movies of the 50s sometimes focused on the 3D effects more than the storytelling. We’ve probably all seen that scene where something releases a heap of balls that come bouncing out of the screen. But I think of the ‘alien monster’ genre as the exemplar of 50s 3D – even though the monsters were just as obviously guys in rubber suits when they were in 3D. These were loud, garish productions, played for cheap thrills. Expensive cheap thrills.
Then, as now, not everybody liked 3D, or could even tolerate it. By the late 50s, cinema-goers were reluctant to pay extra to see something they increasingly regarded as a gimmick.
But it was CinemaScope that really finished of 1950s 3D. This technology allowed for huge, wide-screen images, using lenses that could easily be retro-fitted to existing cameras and projectors. Like 3D, CinemaScope also allowed movie theatres to offer something that TV could not. And, as its proponents never missed an opportunity to point out, you didn’t have to wear special glasses to see it. The trend towards larger and larger screens is also evident today.
So why were movie producers in the 2010s so keen on 3D, knowing that the technology had already failed before? It isn’t even as if 3D technology had changed all that much in preceding 50 years. The studios didn’t do anything differently the second time around – they still emphasized effects over storytelling, and they still used 3D for productions that didn’t benefit from it. It seems that cinema-goers are no more willing now to pay extra for a gimmick than they were in the 1950s. I can only imagine that the studios believed that 3D in combination with contemporary computer graphics would offer something that was not possible in the 50s.
Whatever the explanation, 3D isn’t completely dead. It’s plausible that the next Avatar movie, Fire and Ash, for example, will be shown in 3D. Whether that’s because the filmmakers have a real commitment to the format, or because they started filming it in 2015, I’m not sure.
Other than that, nearly all the 3D movies produced in the last few years have been animated, because it’s no more expensive to produce 3D animation than 2D. If your movie is produced entirely using computer models, as the Lego movies are, then you can just run the rendering process twice, with slightly different camera positions to represent the two eyes of the viewer. It takes more computing power, for sure, but that’s cheap these days.
I lament the passing (more or less) of 3D movies, although sometimes I suspect that nobody else does. I still toy with buying 3D equipment for my home, but I’m put off by the fact that I’ve already seen every movie that was released in 3D, and there might not be any more. Which is a shame.
