Now personally, I’m always interested in anything that can enhance further the fun of watching a movie on a huge screen. I buy tickets for any IMAX release of a film I want to see over seeing said flick on a conventional screen, for instance. And while I’ve always suspected that 3D is the answer to a question that not many people seemed to be asking – films have, after all, survived in two dimensions perfectly well for a long time now – I do believe that evolution of the medium is a good thing. Even if, for some time, 3D was something that was there, but few really seemed interested in doing much with it.

The Journey

Any movie studio that was reluctant to embrace 3D film making, though, surely had its head turned by the performance of last year’s Brendan Fraser headliner, Journey To The Center Of The Earth. This was, to be fair, a shitty little film, but one that played for most of the summer, solely off the back of its 3D gimmickry. And said gimmickry was out in force, with the film feeling like a feature length version of those old 3D cinemas you used to get in theme parks. Any excuse to lug something unconvincingly towards the camera was not resisted, and the end result was a film that coasted by on its 3D work, and little else. Given that it took over $100m at the US box office as a result, it’s unsurprising that a sequel is on the way.

Yet Journey To The Center Of The Earth Again, or whatever the sequel may be called, will have a far tougher time when it finally arrives. For it now seems that there’s not a major movie studio out there that’s not trying to frantically re-tool releases old and new to make the most of the 3D ‘revolution’ while it’s in its infancy, and arguably audience interest is at its highest. Raiding through the archives, films such as the Toy Storys, Beauty And The Beast, Titanic, Star Wars and Lord Of The Rings are all rumoured or have been confirmed for the 3D treatment. I’m always cautious about ‘retrofitting’ such an effect to material that wasn’t intended for 3D transmission in the first place, but nonetheless, I suspect I’ll be buying a couple of tickets for some of those anyway, intrigued to see just what difference 3D will make.

Studios are falling over themselves to add 3D to their existing slate, too, no matter how far into production certain films are. Take the recent Ice Age: Dawn Of The Dinosaurs. This was a two and a half to three year production, yet when we spoke to one of the project’s lead animators (link at the bottom of the article), he revealed that the notion of it being released in 3D wasn’t there from day one. Instead, a stereoscopic team was brought in, with less than a year of production left, to add the necessary effects. That, to us, sounds more like jumping on a bandwagon rather than attempting to properly integrate 3D into a motion picture.