To 3-D or Not to 3-D

A friend of mine at work was talking to me on Monday about Gravity.  He was asking if I recommended it, and I of course did, and added the caveat, “make sure to see it in 3-D” to which he replied, “no, I hate 3-D, I always see everything in 2-D.”

This is a sentiment that has run pretty rampant through movie-watching audiences ever since Avatar brought back the popular 1950’s format and modernized it in a way that only James Cameron can.  This past summer, for example, Despicable Me 2, a hit by all standards, charted a record low 27-percent of its opening weekend sales through 3-D.  This has been mimicked with stunning regularity with otherwise solid hits like World War Z, Monsters University, and The Great Gatsby, all of which had strong theater counts for 3-D movies, but only saw 30-35% of their ticket sales from the medium.

The question becomes why is 3-D trending downward and is there any way of saving it?  The first question is easy.  For starters, not a lot of people enjoy 3-D.  I wear glasses, and so for me it’s always a bit of a struggle.  The 3-D glasses are recycled and frequently smudged and the additional “dimension” doesn’t add much in most films.  I don’t feel like seeing Despicable Me 2 in 3-D theaters would have improved my opinion of the film, though the extra cost from minimal special effects (one or two sharks coming at you is hardly worth the extra $7) probably would have stopped me from enjoying it.

Cost, in an economic downturn, has to be considered perhaps the biggest issue for most moviegoers.  Movie tickets aren’t that expensive if you know where to look (or if you live somewhere aside from Manhattan-my NYC friends, I don’t know how to fix this one), but 3-D is always expensive.  When you throw that onto multiple tickets, you end up spending $60-80 at the movies, and it’s hard to argue that a night at home with a DVD for $10 isn’t a fairly strong cost-benefit compromise.

I don’t know enough about the costing and the margins on 3-D for movie theaters and distributors, so I cannot speak to whether they can lower the price of 3-D without sacrificing profit.  However, if you subtract the cost aspect of the argument, and focus on simply that it doesn’t add anything to the picture, I think that studios, directors, and filmmakers can definitely find a way to win back the 3-D audience.

James Cameron spoke about this decline in Mexico City this past summer, and agreed that he didn’t think that Hollywood was using the 3-D effect properly, and this is partially the problem.  Just as throwing more visual effects or more songs or more actors into a film doesn’t necessarily add to the overall film, and can in fact take away from it, 3-D is also a tool that should only be used when appropriate.  Studios seem to want to put it onto every major film that they release to drive up profit, but this is the equivalent to a television studio adding multiple nights or seasons of a singing competition show just to cash in on it.  If you don’t respect your new toy, people are going to tire of it rapidly.

To prove my point, I thought about all of the movies I have seen in the past five years in 3-D (quite a few) and how many actually were worth the price of the 3-D, and came up with five: Avatar, How to Train Your Dragon, Hugo, Life of Pi, and Gravity.

What stands apart for these three films is a couple of things.  For starters, none of them are terrible movies-no amount of 3-D is going to save Wrath of the Titans, for example.  All of them are very special effects driven, but they also have effects that really cater to the 3-D.  It’s clear with all of the films that they were made with 3-D in mind.  It isn’t just a movie where 3-D was tacked on at the last minute.  Instead, the editing in all five films is specifically geared toward the audience viewing the film in 3-D.  While the films lose none of their potency in 2-D (I’ve seen both Life of Pi and Avatar in that format and been fine), the 3-D certainly adds to the epic element, the immersive quality of the pictures, and you see 3-D buzzing everywhere in the film.  The 3-D immerses you more fully into the picture.  It’s not just there for a gimmick, and it’s not only relevant when there’s an effect happening onscreen.  Every frame is spurring with life and effects, and you find yourself more clearly experiencing the world.

In the case of four of these pictures, it helps that they’re at the hands of a true world-class filmmaker.  You’d be hard-pressed to find a group of men who understand the cinema and its dreamlike appeal more than James Cameron, Martin Scorsese, Ang Lee, and Alfonso Cuaron, and perhaps that is what is most evident in why 3-D works for them.  They didn’t use this just to make a lot of money (well, if they did, it wasn’t the only reason).  They did it because 3-D enhanced their picture and gave us a better insight into their artistic vision.  It’s hard to fathom any of these men just tacking 3-D onto their picture without putting much thought into it (and before you say it, the Titanic 3-D with James Cameron was pretty solid, in my opinion, though not approaching these five movies).  Instead, these men made a creative decision to build a picture around their new tool, and as a result, it was worth the expense.

So while I have not been a huge fan of 3-D, I don’t want to see it go away entirely.  We just need filmmakers, like we always do, who are focused more on their story and vision, rather than just making an easy buck.  And since one of those filmmakers is Alfonso Cuaron, do yourself a favor and see Gravity on the biggest, most dimensioned screen you can find.