Who cares what picture we see?

From today's IMDB Movie & TV News:

Will 3-D Rescue Movie Business?

Digital 3-D cinema could be the motion picture industry's strongest defense against piracy, Titanic director James Cameron said Sunday. Speaking at the National Association of Broadcasters' Digital Cinema Summit in Las Vegas, Cameron said that Digital 3-D "offers a powerful experience which you can only have in the movie theater." He lauded technology that permits virtually any film to be transformed into a 3-D version, and indicated that he is considering releasing his 1997 blockbuster Titanic in 3-D. "Digital 3-D is a revolutionary form of showmanship that is within our grasp. It can get people off their butts and away from their portable devices and get people back in the theaters where they belong," he said.

Always nice to get industry advice from a blockbuster director who seems far more interested in announcing new projects than in actually finishing any of them. (A quick peek at his IMDB page shows he's involved with three different films, all still in the pre-production stage; hopefully, one of these will start filming before he reads more manga.)

Still, he may have a point. Hardly a week goes by, there isn't griping about the state of ticket sales these days, and endless speculation about what's keeping moviegoers away. These speculations tend to fixate on three theories: the ready access to downloadable, pirated material, the quality of the movies, and the quality of the theater experience itself.

I'm not sure how much I buy the pirate-phobia. The movies I've watched on my computer (wait- um- it was a friend's computer! From college! And he was totally gay, so go persecute him), they weren't movies I'd had any interest in seeing in the theaters anyway, or if they were, I wasn't choosing to forgoe a trip to the theater just so I could stay at home and spent three hours hunched over a monitor trying to fix the volume on a networked copy of Magnolia. If I could've gotten to see it on the big screen, I would have, and I'd argue that a lot of the folks who d/l movies would say the same. If you want something so badly you'll spend three days getting it off the Internet, you're probably someone who's still going to shlep to the cinema fairly often.

The dwindling audience, then, is probably made up more of dabblers than hardcore Bittorrent fanatics. If they aren't as deeply invested in cinema to begin with, then, it makes sense to assume that a drop-off in movie quality might make them lose interest, but that's a damnably difficult thing to judge. Especially when week after week, the number one movie in the country is the one with the worst reviews. As earnings decrease, studios turn to product they believe will be reliably profitable; and even though your average remake or sequel has less texture than reheated Who Hash, it practically guarantees a return on the initial investment, especially on video. So, sad to say, if theater attendance is dropping because of the number of crummy reheats, then the situation isn't going to get better any time soon.

There is, however, a certain inevitably in the decline of the big movie houses. The quality of legitimate home entertainment releases has made it easier than it ever was to come close to a theater experience in your own home, and while most of us can't afford projection TVs and massive stereo sound, not having your eyes and ears bleed is a small price to pay to avoid the endless hassles attendant in most cineplexes. Between cell phones, plot explainers ("Wait who's he?" "Oh, HIM, yes, I know him, I read this somewhere, he totally killed that other women." "Her?" "No, he hasn't killed her. Yet." "Now who's he?" "That's a lamp." "Really?" "It's possessed." "Ooooooo."), sticky floors, bratty kids, seat-kickers and a hundred other complaints, it seems impossible to justify the money and effort it takes to get to the theater, when you could just wait a month, and watch the whole thing at home.

That's where the 3-D stuff comes in. Clearly, in order for the big chains to revitalize, they need to offer an experience that we can't get in our living rooms, something that's appealing enough to entice an audience into taking out the small business loan required to get a pair of tickets and a large popcorn. 3-D is a possibility, especially the incredibly high tech method their describing. I'm not entirely sold, though. For one thing, it's gimmicky as hell, and for another, I wear glasses; I'm skeptical of any new 3-D process, as the old red and blue stuff never worked consistently for me.

Still, those cardboard specs were pretty boss. And I do remember being blown away when I went to Disneyworld with my parents and saw Captain Eo, so who knows. Maybe by the time Cameron gets around to putting out a new movie, the characters will actually have some depth.