Star Wars 3D | The stereoscopic six-film saga that never happened

Star Wars 3D The Phantom Menace
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Twenty years ago, George Lucas was talking about remastering his six Star Wars films in 3D. To date, only The Phantom Menace has ever emerged.


In April 2015, visitors to that year’s Star Wars Celebration in Anaheim were given an opportunity that no other Lucasverse fan had been offered before or since: they could see all three prequels in 3D. 

Preserved thanks to the Wayback Machine’s archiving magic, the celebration’s website lists the screening dates for each Star Wars prequel, with The Phantom Menace and its follow-up Attack Of The Clones screening on the 16th April and Revenge Of The Sith scheduled for the day after. Visitors who bought tickets would also have been given a pair of Star Wars-themed 3D glasses.

This was, at least to date, the last time the 3D conversions of Star Wars episodes II and III have been shown to the public. The Phantom Menace’s stereoscopic edition was released in cinemas in 2012, but a series of factors meant that the second and third episodes were shelved.

In retrospect, the plans to re-release the Star Wars saga in 3D were the victim of some cosmically bad timing.

Six of the best

Incredibly, George Lucas was talking publicly about releasing 3D versions of his six mainline Star Wars films as long ago as 2005. In an edition of Entertainment Weekly, published in April that year, Lucasfilm was banging the marketing drum for Revenge Of The Sith, due to make its cinema debut the month after. At the time, a handful of movies were being made in 3D, but the huge craze kicked off by James Cameron’s Avatar in 2009 hadn’t happened yet. 

Back then, the highest-profile 3D movies were things like Robert Rodriguez’s family adventures Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over and The Adventures Of Shark Boy And Lava Girl or Robert Zemeckis’s The Polar Express. Avatar was so far off that, in 2005, it was barely even in discussion; at the time, James Cameron’s next opus, said to be shot in 3D, was going to be Battle Angel, then scheduled for release in 2007. (It didn’t emerge until 2019 ā€“ directed by, funnily enough, Robert Rodriguez.) 

Entertainment Weekly reported at the time that Lucas had announced his plans to “convert all six Star Wars movies to 3D” and re-release them annually, beginning in 2007. “Lucas hopes Star Wars can help kick-start a digital 3D craze,” journalist Joshua Rich added. 

Had Lucasfilm kept to its original schedule, Star Wars could have beaten Avatar ā€“ another sci-fi fantasy ā€“ to cinemas by about two years. In an alternative reality, it might even have been The Phantom Menace that became digital 3D’s killer app rather than James Cameron’s epic.

The 4th January 2005 edition of Entertainment Weekly ā€“ the first report we can find of George Lucas talking about 3D Star Wars films. Credit: Entertainment Weekly.

Headaches

It isn’t clear exactly what led to the lengthy delay; Lucasfilm didn’t talk about the 3D conversions again until September 2010, when it and distributor 20th Century Fox announced that The Phantom Menace would appear in cinemas at some point in February 2012. Again, the stated aim was to re-release the subsequent episodes in numerical order approximately a year apart.

Unfortunately for Lucasfilm, the initial thrill of excitement over 3D had diminished somewhat by 2012. Emboldened by the record-breaking success of Avatar and its eye-catching use of 3D, movie studios started rushing out stereoscopic versions of their own output. M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender (2010) looked as murky and grey as a coastal winter; Clash Of The Titans (2010), whose 3D post-conversion was cobbled together in around two months, would soon prove to be infamous. 

For every film that made a genuinely considered, detailed use of 3D ā€“ Gravity, Hugo or Tron: Legacy ā€“ there were many more that were, at their worst, headache-inducing. Given that movie-goers were paying a premium for their plastic 3D spectacles, it’s little surprise that interest soon began to wane. As Jeffrey Katzenberg ā€“ then DreamWorks Animation’s boss ā€“ put it at the time, “It was a game-changing opportunity for the industry… when we gave them an exceptional film that was artistic and creative and celebrated, people were happy. … Then others came along and took the low road and gimmickized it. Instantly we lost good will”.

Clash Of The Titans, starring Sam Worthington
Clash Of The Titans was a hit for Warner Bros in 2010 ā€“ arguably despite its iffy 3D rather than because of it. Credit: Warner Bros.

Phantom pain

Looking at reviews from the time, The Phantom Menace’s 3D conversion was decent if unspectacular; several critics noticed that Lucas and his collaborators had tinkered with one scene to have Anakin Skywalker jab his spanner at the audience. Similarly, writer Craig Skinner ā€“ one of the few people to see Attack Of The Clones in 3D ā€“ described its post-conversion as a ā€œmixed bagā€ in his review.

The box office returns for the stereoscopic Menace were far from spectacular (roughly $100m all told), though the argument made by an analyst Entertainment Weekly spoke to in February 2012 suggested that it was an acceptable start, and that it was the Original Trilogy that fans really wanted to see in 3D.

“The truly exciting thing would be to see the first Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return Of The Jedi in 3D,” said Hollywood.com’s Paul Dergarabedian. “It’s sort of like saving your big guest for the end of the show so people don’t leave after the beginning.”

Lucasfilm itself put out a statement after The Phantom Menace 3D’s release, hinting at future conversions getting a showing in cinemas. “It’s exciting to see a whole new generation of fans experience Star Wars on the big screen, the way it was meant to be seen,” it read. “We look forward to bringing more of our galaxy far, far away to fans in 3D!”

Selling the ranch

The major blow for Star Wars’ 3D future, however, came later in 2012. That October, George Lucas completed a deal with Disney which saw Lucasfilm, and by extension effects studio Industrial Light & Magic and the film rights to Star Wars and Indiana Jones, sold for roughly $4bn. As part of its announcement, Disney announced that a new sequel, what would become The Force Awakens, was planned for release in 2015.

In January 2013, mere weeks after the acquisition, Lucasfilm announced that plans to reissue more Star Wars films in 3D had been dropped. ā€œGiven the recent development that we are moving forward with a new Star Wars trilogy, we will now focus 100 per cent of our efforts on Star Wars: Episode VII in order to ensure the best possible experience for our fans,ā€ the studio wrote in a press release ā€œWe will post further information about our 3D release plans at a later date.ā€

Read more: Star Wars: Revenge Of The Sith | The 2005 online leak that saw the FBI get involved

Clearly, work on converting Attack On The Clones and Revenge Of The Sith had already been completed at this point, since these were shown at the aforementioned Star Wars Celebrations. After that, the 3D versions of these films were quietly shelved.

Ironically, The Force Awakens and other post-acquisition Star Wars films were given 3D versions for their cinema releases, and were even released as 3D Blu-rays. You might have thought that Disney-Lucasfilm would consider releasing the converted prequels in 3D as well so that fans could have at least a partially complete set; and in fact, there was a rumour in 2016 that there were plans to release a special box set of Episodes I to III in 3D ā€“ timed to coincide with the release of that year’s spin-off, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) and Padme (Natalie Portman) sit together on some grass in Star Wars: Episode II - Attack Of The Clones.
Imagine this scintillating moment of romance, but in 3D. Credit: Disney/Lucasfilm.

Digital domain

That boxset never happened, of course. And while many higher-end televisions still support 3D, stereoscopy’s cultural moment appears to have passed, much as it did in the 1950s and 1980s. Disney may opt to drag its 3D prequels out of the archives at some point, but given the expense, it’s unlikely it’ll pay to have the Original Trilogy given the same conversion. (There were rumours that all six films had been converted; we’ve found no evidence of this during our research.)

Going back to that 2005 Entertainment Weekly piece, it seems that George Lucas, a filmmaker always keen to push at the technical barriers of his industry, was a couple of years ahead of his time when it came to 3D. In order to realise his Star Wars post-conversion ambitions, he needed a mass adoption of the digital projectors that modern 3D movies required. At the time, digital projector technology was vastly more expensive than the traditional sort, and Lucas received some verbal pushback from cinema owners.

John Fithian, then head of the National Association of Theatre owners, said of Lucas’s 3D plans, “We understand his interest in new technologies, but [they] will be implemented when they’re ready, with the appropriate business plans, and not when George Lucas says it should happen.”

Ultimately, it would be Avatar, and not Star Wars, that forced cinemas to move over to digital, 3D projectors. 

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