Why the New 3D Movies Are Successful

It has been a pretty successful year so far for 3D movies. As of Easter 2010, for an entire month the #1 movie at the box office has been one in 3D thanks to three movies in a row, Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, the animated movie How to Tame Your Dragon, and the remake of the 80s cult classic Clash of the Titans. This after the year began with Avatar, which is currently the all time box office champ. Avatar also had an Academy nomination for Best Picture along with another 3D feature film, the animated Up which won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature. With more high budget 3D films on the way, and Sony's new 3D televisions with the announcement of the launch of 3D cable networks, it is certain that 3D is no longer a passing fad, and could possibly replace the standard 2D content we are so use to in the next few years, just as sound film replaced silent movies.

This has not been the case in the past. 3D films have been around since the silent era. In the 1950s there was an explosion of 3D movies, followed by another smaller wave of 3D movies in the 1980s. Both times 3D was no more than a gimmick that once audiences grew bored of disappeared from mainstream cinema. This time though 3D is no longer being treated like a gimmick but as a legitimate theatrical experience. The first wave of popularity with 3D movies was due to the arrival of television. Back in the 1920s movie theaters lost millions of dollars in business thanks to the arrival of Radio. Instead of going to the theater nearly every night of the week people began staying home to listen to free music and other entertainment. At the time sound on film was just a gimmick, but one sound film in particular called The Jazz Singer was breaking box office records. In order to draw business back to the theaters motion picture studios began producing sound movies, inevitably investing so much money in the process that it became impossible to go back to silent films once the fad wore off.

With Television growing in popularity in the early 1950s studios feared the worst. If radio could draw away two thirds of their business, then radio with pictures could put them out of business for good. Desperately they began to look for another gimmick that would be as popular as sound was in the late '20s early 1930s but could not be reproduced on television. There were three contenders. Wide screen, color, and 3D. Color had been around since the mid 1920s but was so expensive it was only used on major productions. Wide-screen too had been around for a while and was only used sparingly in a few big budget movies. But 3D was merely a gimmick and had rarely ever been used in any mainstream Hollywood production. Since wide-screen and color was already established 3D seemed like the best contender. The only problem was that in order to make the 3D work theater goers would have to don a pair of cardboard glasses, which is why studios initially balked on the idea.

Milton and Julian Gunzburg had invented the Natural Vision 3D film process and had spent months shopping it to the movie studios with no success. Independent producer Arch Oboler was already filming a low budget movie based on the Tsavo man eaters incident of 1898 where up to 135 workers on the Kenyan railroad were killed by two man eating lions known as The Ghost and The Darkness. Realizing that the idea of these lions jumping out at the audience in 3D would look spectacular Oboler scrapped the ten minutes of footage he had shot for the movie after the Gunzburg brothers showed him a demonstration of their 3D process and began shooting his movie in 3D. The finished project, Bwana Devil, was promoted as the first full length 3D feature film and was a hit at all the theaters it was previewed at, compelling United Artists to buy the distribution rights. Bwana Devil went on to become a huge hit and soon other studios began producing their own 3D movies. There was a mixture of low budget movies such as Cat Women of the Moon, and big budget productions such as Kiss Me Kate. But they all had one thing in common which was the deliberate exploitation of the 3D effects. In House of Wax a man thrills a crowd for five minutes with a paddle ball which he bounces right into the camera. In Robot Monster the invading alien Ro-Man who has decimated all but a few surviving humans for some reason has a machine that produces bubbles among his arsenal. Directors felt the need to continuously prove the 3D worth of the movie by having characters poke stuff at the screen. It was so cheesy and obvious that nearly 30 years later Second City Television would parody it with their Dr Tongue character who would continually move props in and out of the screen. With directors compromising the quality of movies by finding excuses to poke things out at the viewers even to the detriment of the films plot, very few quality 3D movies were made and audiences quickly grew tiered of the fad. Meanwhile Hollywood decided that a combination of wide screen and color would be enough to keep patrons returning to the theaters, this augmented by the end of the '70s with stereophonic soundtracks.

The second wave of the 3D movie fad happened in the '80s and once again directors spent too much time poking stuff out at the audience rather than delivering a decent movie. Set decorators became preoccupied with hanging props everywhere to the point of ridiculous. But what really did the '80s 3D boom in was studios insistence on using B movie scripts. The only attempt at a quality 3D movie was through Universal for Jaws 3D, unfortunately marred by giving the film to first time director Joe Alves. Th 3D movie that got the best critical acclaim was Friday the 13th Part III, and considering how much critics hated the movies in that franchise shows you the poor quality the '80s 3D movies were and why it also came to an end.

The current 3D movie boom began with computerized special effects rather than any conscious attempt to film movies with 3D effects. In the '90s computer software was developed that could recreate convincing models of both scenery and animated creatures. It was used in everything from the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park to the ship in Titanic. With each year these computer programs became more advanced as did the hardware that they ran on. Eventually they were sophisticated enough that entire animated scenes could be stored inside computers as 3D models. In other words a scene from Toy Story would have all the toys and the entire room stored on software. Not only did this allow the director to run the scene over and over again but allowed him to see it from virtually any angle. It did not take long for them to realize that Toy Story or any of the other computer animated films released by Pixar could easily be turned into 3D movies. All they need do is take the scenes stored on computer and create two different negatives shot at slightly different angles to simulate the distance between your two eyes. In regular 3D movies two cameras are used to recreate this effect. It did not take long before special 3D editions of these animated movies were released to theaters. Since live action movies were also using the same computer programs to create their special effects producers decided to add an extra camera so that a potential 3D edition could also be released. In many cases these special editions were only partially in 3D with perhaps only the movies climax featuring the 3D effects. Special 3D editions were seen as a way to make a little more money off of a movie that had already run it's course at the box office. Inevitably the 3D editions became popular enough that studios began releasing them simultaneously with the regular 2D editions.

Since these movies were meant to be primarily released as 2D features directors saw no reason to pander to those watching the 3D versions. And there was little need to. With the onset of computerized special effects directors were planning shots at impossible angles and CGI creatures were already jumping at the screen. The difference was that these shots were not planned out to deliberately pop out towards the audience as with past 3D movies. Instead the scenes were planned out to best utilize the special effects themselves. The 3D just happened to complement the effects. This did not mean that there were no throwbacks to the earlier cheesy shots. A 3D remake of the '80s splatter film My Bloody Valentine had the cliche shots of the killer throwing his weapons at the camera. Still other movies like Up and Avatar which were planned as 3D avoided the cliche shots of things popping out at the camera realizing the 3D would look spectacular as is. This is perhaps one of the reasons why 3D seems to be taking a foothold. When Technicolor was originally introduced directors over did it with colorful sets and costumes. Inevitably by the '50s color on film was toned down to something more natural looking. The same thing must happen for 3D to evolve from gimmick to a film standard. Will this happen? Sound, color, and stereo were all once just gimmicks but all evolved into the standard. There is no reason why 3D could not as well. And as further proof that soon every released movie could be in 3D, new computer programs have been designed that allow the conversion of standard 2D movies into 3D. Clash of the Titans was shot in 2D and converted into 3D after the fact so that Warner Brothers could capitalize on the current 3D boom. George Lucas has already announced that he will be converting all the Star Wars films into 3D, which if successful could result in the conversion of many other film classics. In the years to come you may be seeing The Wizard of Oz and Lawrence of Arabia released as 3D versions.