Donald Clarke: Is it time to dust off your 3D specs?

Seven or eight years ago, I was required to attend a commercial screening of an animated children’s film. Raised frugally, I thought to root through the drawer then stuffed with 3D glasses before making my way to a popular cinema chain. It took about 20 minutes of anthropomorphic action before I realised why children were elbowing their parents and sniggering in my direction. Incredibly, the thing was not projected in that now little-lamented format.

It was the success of the first Avatar film in 2009 that turned digital 3D into the must-have accessory for marquee cinema.

I open with this anecdote for two reasons. First, to confirm that, early in the last decade, absolutely everything was in 3D. Werner Herzog, Jean-Luc Godard, Wim Wenders and Martin Scorsese all delivered films in the format. It was seen as commercial insanity not to release a mainstream blockbuster with sticky-out bits. I also tell the story to remind cinemagoers how unimpressive the low-end 3D conversions often looked. One found oneself swinging the spectacles up and down to see if they did anything other than make the screen darker. For that you paid an extra €2 or €3.

A glance last Wednesday at the website for my local multiplex revealed that not a single film was screening in 3D. Not Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Not Morbius. Not Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore. Certainly not Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World (though it was nice to see it available). So the horrible business has, for the second or third time, been banished to the annals of history? Has it again joined such gimmicks as Emergo, Sensurround, Polyvision and Smell-o-Vision as a quaint artefact of its age?

Well, not so fast. In the “upcoming” listings section we learn that next week’s Marvel flick, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which promises to be all kinds of psychedelic, will be available in 2D, 3D, Imax 3D and the ferociously gimmicky 4-DX. At the recent CinemaCon in Las Vegas it was confirmed that James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water, due for release at Christmas, will also be “shown in all formats”. The horrible process has not entirely vanished.

Why does nobody have the decency to protest any more?

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It is fitting that news of Cameron’s science-fiction sequel should be among the triggers for these recollections. It was the success of the first Avatar film in 2009 that turned digital 3D into the must-have accessory for marquee cinema. Avatar made so much money (it recently regained the title of highest-grossing film ever) that we cannot attribute its success entirely to the premium placed on 3D tickets, but the temptations of that surcharge certainly spurred competing studios to jump on the stereoscopic bandwagon. The Avatar effect also accelerated the advance of digital projection, as cinemas finally forked out for the equipment required to deliver the Na’vi in full depth. Films now come in small oblong bricks rather than stacks of flat cylindrical cannisters.

When, last week, I asked cinemagoers about the last 3D film they saw, many began with literal or metaphorical eye rolls. Few people have much positive to say about this once-dominant process. It was expensive. If you wore glasses it was uncomfortable and, as the 3D specs were rarely positioned correctly over your own frames, the images were often slightly blurred. Brightness varied hugely according to projection standards. I saw the first 20 minutes of Ridley Scott's Prometheus at the studio's offices in London and every image was crisp and well-lit. Later, watching the whole film in a commercial cinema, I could barely tell Sigourney Weaver from Michael Fassbender through the sepulchral gloom.

Many people I asked, already wiping the bad times from memory, claimed the last thing they saw in 3D was Avatar. After a little poking they remembered 3D screenings of a Marvel film or a Pixar flick or, from 2015, Mad Max: Fury Road. The artistic highpoint for the technique may have been Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity in 2013. While all this was happening, a parallel, ultimately unsuccessful push was on to promote 3D television.

As long ago as 2011, Slate magazine was asking “Who killed 3D?” The answer should have been “nobody… yet”. But there was indeed a steady, yearly decline in box office receipts for 3D films from the medium’s high-point in 2010. By 2019 just 15 per cent of US cinema takings were for films projected stereoscopically. Nothing so indifferently regarded could last forever. It just took longer than expected to get this close to the technique’s ultimate doom.

The irony is that, if historical precedent is any guide, 3D cinema's decline coincided with events that should have greatly encouraged its promotion. The first great wave of 3D arrived during the 1950s as a response to television. Netflix had been online for two years before Avatar arrived, but, by the time the streaming boom really struck, digital stereoscopy was already in the wane. Where are our era's cinematic hucksters? Crank skeletons through the auditorium as William Castle did for House on Haunted Hill in 1959. Electrocute the seats as he did with The Tingler. Or just trust Avatar 2. Nobody has yet lost money betting on Jim Cameron.