In the run-up to Avatar: The Way Of Water, 3D movies (briefly) found their way back into multiplexes. Ahead of its sequel, the tech has all but disappeared. What happened?
In the latter months of 2022, the cinema I worked in at the time had a special delivery. A previously empty back room was stuffed to bursting with cardboard and plastic; boxes of 3D specs spliced the traditional popcorn scent with the unmistakable whiff of a third dimension. Avatar: The Way Of Water was on its way – and this time, 3D was coming back with it.
Before James Cameron’s festive release date, though, we had a few months of programming to get people ready. Perhaps worried that a return trip to Pandora would leave audiences with dimensional whiplash, the schedule was packed with a gamut of old favourites and post-converted new releases. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, joined a remastering of Cameron’s Titanic while The Polar Express and the original Avatar returned to the big screen to remind us which way up the glasses go. Clearly looking at the 2011 boom in 3D following the franchise’s first film, Hollywood seemed to be banking on The Way Of Water having a similarly rejuvenating effect on the famous fad format.
Cut to two-and-half years later. How’d that work out?
Catching a 3D screening of a film in the UK these days is like catching a cold from inside a bucket of Vaporub (difficult, sensorially overwhelming and more expensive than it’s worth). Of the 104 screenings in London’s Leicester Square this Wednesday (handily home to four branches of the three largest cinema chains in the UK) just four of them are in standard 3D. Cineworld, having tied its colours to the 4DX mast long ago, also has five pseudo-roller coaster screenings in a room incapable of playing anything else, but I’m not sure that counts.
The difference between the potential post-Covid boom and the previous one is stark. After years of flooding the market with cheap post-conversions, Hollywood hasn’t done much to rescue the much-derided format’s reputation. It hasn’t shot a film in native 3D, Cameron’s blue people aside, since 2019’s Gemini Man. If any audiences have seen another 3D film in the cinema since then, chances are it was the victim of a process which achieved little more than drain 20% of its screen brightness. When the same period has seen large-scale formats like IMAX and Dolby – where strong colour contrast is a key part of the appeal – increase in popularity, that could prove to be a problem.
Because while the 2010s were much-derided for the mass-adoption of 3D across films which didn’t need it, filmmakers still put their money where their mouth was and gave us a few flicks which genuinely benefitted from having pointy things fly out of the screen. The likes of Hugo, Gravity, The Adventures Of Tintin and Ready Player One trained audiences to think that the technology could be additive rather than simply annoying.
Not so in the 2020s. Far from kick-starting a new 3D boom, Avatar has become the one franchise keeping plastic glasses manufacturers in business. And with three more trips to Pandora in the pipeline, is one blue family enough to sustain an entire cinemagoing format?
In the last week, Disney finally released the first trailer for Avatar: Fire And Ash. If any franchise has the power to get audiences digging out their 3D specs again, surely it’s this one. But unless you’re one of the dozen or so people who’ve chosen to watch The Fantastic Four: First Steps in 3D, you almost certainly won’t have seen the footage the way Cameron intended.
All of which spells a problem for the director’s pet project. The first Avatar emerged as the 3D phenomenon was just taking off and supercharged it; the second came into a post-pandemic cinema landscape still very much in flux, with nostalgia and novelty value for the 13-year-old series intact. Fire And Ash has neither of these benefits and, without the cinema infrastructure in place to turn 3D moviegoing back into a habit, how long can the format’s golden goose keep its head above water?
