3D Theater is Amazing, In Theory

Here’s a scene that we’ve all experienced, hopefully only once. You pack the car with your family or close friends because its movie night! The only time when it’s okay, and encouraged, to eat as much popcorn as you can fit in your stomach while watching a movie that you’ve never seen before. Everyone in the car decides on a movie after at least ten minutes of people pitching why they think you should want to see their proposed movie. Just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, someone says, “hold up, there’s a 3D version showing at the same time, should we do that?” Out of curiosity, everyone nods their heads in approval.

Finally, you arrive at the movie theaters, the anticipation is over. You can see your movie printed boldly on the list outside of the building and the night sky is lit up with bright, neon colors coming from the theater. Everyone enters the building, dazzled by the sparkling carpets and chrome silhouettes you almost don’t notice the sound of the hundreds of popcorn kernels popping every minute. You buy your tickets and set your sights on the snack bar, which smells more and more like buttery popcorn the closer you get. Everyone buys enough candy to feed a whole neighborhoods worth of sugar crazy trick-or-treaters. Finally, you get to your seats and the film starts rolling. Hold on, why is the screen all blurry? You think, there must be something wrong with the projector. Suddenly, you remember the cashier gave you 3D glasses that were hastily shoved into your pockets so you could use both hands to carry your platter of snacks.

After dawning these flimsy cardboard glasses, you are in awe for a few minutes as objects start jumping off the screen right towards you. Once the “awe” factor subsides you realize that the movie is very difficult to follow because the background is completely dominated by the object that has the 3D effect. Worse yet, you think your having a migraine because looking through the 3D glasses is giving you a massive headache. You take them off, only to remember that the screen looks like one giant blur without the glasses. Now your stuck with the decision of watching a blurry movie or watching a movie with a worsening headache.

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Maybe that story was a little bit exaggerated but the problems with 3D theater are real and the decline in sales shows that people are getting fed up. The pinnacle of 3D theater was in 2010, when James Cameron's, Avatar, was released in theaters. A critically-acclaimed movie with the highest tier of 3D animation. At this point, the world thought the dawn of a golden age of 3D theater was upon us, and things would only go up from here as technology would get better and better. This did not happen. In fact, from 2010 to 2017, 3D movie box office revenues steadily declined from $2.2 billion to $1.3 billion shown in the chart below. How did this happen to such a promising Industry?

Credit: TechCrunch.com

An article by Collider says it best, “studios treated 3D like a gold mine and exploited the vein as voraciously as possible. Now it’s dry, consumers are disinterested, and while there are still 3D releases, the tech no longer matters.” Being able to charge more per ticket for 3D films, movie studios began rushing their post-production, leading to 3D movies like Clash of the Titans and G.I. Joe: Retaliation becoming the laughing stock of the box office. Instead of working to continuously improve 3D technology, studios pumped out as many films as possible to turn big profits in the short-term. Now viewers are sick of badly produced 3D films and opt for the 2D versions. Movie studios are recognizing the lack of interest as well, according to CinemaBlend, only 26 3D movies were released in 2018, compared to 44 in 2017.

Credit: TechCrunch.com

Many people forget that 3D movies have been around since the 1950s and have gone in and out of style multiple times since then. In this generation, we saw a 3D theater revival with the release of Avatar in 2010, and a subsequent decline over the past nine years. 3D movies have the potential to be amazing, and they can be, if we take the time to get the technology right instead of jumping at the chance to make a buck like a pack of hungry wolves over an injured bison.

Holoscreen is a step in the right direction for 3D theater. Adding a HoloscreenProtector to your dual-camera smart phone allows you to take 3D videos of your own that don’t require any special glasses to view. By taking the glasses out of the equation, we have won half of the battle. Now the focus can be on making the clearest graphics possible. Hopefully 3D theater will come back around to stay when movie studios are ready to take their time and the technology becomes more user friendly.