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player ready...In 1953, 3-D movies exploded onto the nation’s movie screens. With titles like “Bwana Devil,” “It Came From Outer Space,” “Robot Monster” and “House of Wax,” 3-D movies were supposed to rescue Hollywood from the encroaching scourge that was TV.
Rob Engle, senior stereographer and digital effects supervisor for Sony Pictures Imageworks, the studio’s visual-effects arm, remembers most of the films as being “pretty terrible.”
But 3-D is on the march anew, with two films currently in theaters and more promised — featuring directors and producers such as Steven Spielberg, Jim Cameron and Robert Zemekis, who collaborated with Imageworks on last year’s 3-D version of “Beowulf.”
And, with more screens capable of showing 3-D movies as well as technological advances that will erase the headaches suffered by audiences wearing cheesy cardboard glasses when 3-D movies were shown on inferior equipment by negligent projectionists, the trend should show a little more staying power this time around.
“2009 is going to be a watershed year [for 3-D],” Engle says. “Beowulf” was released in traditional 2-D, 3-D and the hyper-powered IMAX 3-D. Though only a fifth of the screens showing the film offered it in 3-D, the eye-popping versions accounted for more than 40 percent of the film’s box-office take.
Last weekend, the 3-D “Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert” topped the weekend box office with a record-setting $31.1 million, per final studio figures compiled Monday by Exhibitor Relations.
It joins “U2 3D,” another concert film currently in theaters. More high-profile 3-D films are due in the next two years.
“If you had a front-row seat at a ‘Hannah Montana’ concert, you didn’t have as good a seat as you do here,” says Art Repola, producer of “Best of Both Worlds Concert” and vice president of visual effects for Disney.
Imageworks’ Estes, who helped create the 3-D effects in “Beowulf,” says, “You go to a 2-D movie and it’s a group experience, whereas a 3-D movie tends to be more of a personal experience. You’re in a room with a bunch of other people, but it’s now occurring in your own personal space. It’s a pretty different dynamic. It’s coming at you — you’re not going to push your neighbor out of the way when the spear is coming right at you.”
But will 3-D movies be able to show any staying power when they’ve flopped miserably in the past?
“Studios are definitely hoping that the 3-D element will help give moviegoers a reason to leave their flat-screen TVs and go to a movie theater for an event film,” says Gitesh Pandya, creator of the popular movie Web site boxofficeguru.com.
Repola agrees, adding: “If you put solid storytelling with the right filmmakers and add this extra component, you see all the reasons you’re seeing more and more of this.”
COMING SOON IN 3-D
Here’s a select list of upcoming 3-D movies and their tentative release dates.
– “Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D”: Brendan Fraser stars in this take on the Jules Verne classic. (July 11)
“Fly Me to the Moon”: Computer-animated saga of houseflies stowed aboard the Apollo 11 moonshot. (Aug. 22)
“Bolt”: Disney computer-animated tale of a dog who comes to believe that he really does possess the powers his character has on his TV show. (Nov. 26)
“Coraline”: Dakota Fanning voices the lead in this adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s best-seller about a young girl uncovering the treacherous secrets of a creepy old house. (Feb. 2009)
“Monsters vs. Aliens”: Dreamworks’ first animated 3-D film is based on the graphic novel “Rex Havoc,” about a monster hunter who battles aliens who have disrupted cable TV service. (March 2009)
“A Christmas Carol”: Robert Zemeckis again uses performance-capture technology to essay the Charles Dickens classic. (Nov. 2009)
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“Avatar”: Humans vs. aliens on a distant planet. From James Cameron. (Dec. 2009)
“Toy Story,” “Toy Story 2,” “Toy Story 3”: All scheduled for their first 3-D releases from 2009 to 2010.