3D Vision Blog

If you’ve seen the Clash of the Titans in 3D last year you might’ve left the movie theater very disappointed, both from the movie being nothing special and the fact that the 3D was actually quite bad, so bad in fact that when talking about bad conversion to 3D of a movie most people directly associate it with that particular title. And indeed the conversion from the 2D footage that was originally shot for that movie to 3D wasn’t done good and the fact that the movie was full of special effects did not help much the conversion to 3D. And now it is time for the sequel of the movie called Wrath of the Titans (3D) and yet again it was not shot in 3D, but was instead shot in 2D and them converted to 3D in post, so are you ready for another disappointment? Haven’t seem the movie myself yet, and I’m not really sure that I’d go to see it after the disappointment from the first one and the first reviews about the Wrath of the Titans aren’t doing it any good without even mentioning the 3D of the movie. So would you go and watch it and in 3D or not, knowing that it is converted to 3D and with all the bad reviews from the previous movie?

Roughly 20 years after the original premiere, the classic movie Jurassic Park will be seeing its re-release on the big screen, converted in 3D format. The premiere of the 2D to 3D conversion of the movie has been announced for July 19th, 2013 or a bit more than a year for now. There was already information about the possibility of the conversion to 3D for Jurassic Park circling around for a while now, but now it has been officially confirmed by Universal Pictures as they have apparently convinced the director Steven Spielberg to also take active part in the conversion. This will be the first of Spielberg’s directed movies to get the 2D to 3D treatment following in the footsteps of Lucas’ Star Wars and Cameron’s Titanic 3D conversions. And if you ask yourself if the 3D conversion of Jurassic Park will be any good, hopefully it will be as there is enough time to make it good, but we’ll have to wait and see…

The Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace 3D has been available for a while now in movie theaters and although it may not have generate that much interest as George Lucas has hoped for, he can generally consider the conversion to 3D a success. Some people were Ok with the level of quality of the conversion to 3D, others were disappointed, but in the end it is all down to the numbers for the big guys in Hollywood. And it depends on these numbers if Lucas will decide to convert the other parts of the Star wars saga in 3D as well or not, but it is not only about the Star Wars as other movie studios are also interested in the results to help them decide should they convert old movies in 3D and bring them back to the big screen for a re-release in 3D…

So based on the numbers was the Star Wars Episode 1 3D conversion a success or not? The US box office shows that the movie has generated over $40 million dollars revenue and internationally the 3D release of Star Wars Episode 1 has accumulated over $46 million dollars, so getting something like $100 million US dollars worldwide in just about a month for an old movie that was converted to 3D is something that can be considered as a success. The budget required for a 3D conversion is significantly less that what you would need for shooting a large scale new movie and with a revenue from it going to something like $100 million dollars for everyone looking just at the numbers is a huge success. Does that make the viewers expecting a spectacular experience from the 3D conversion happy, probably not that much as the experience could’ve been better, and hopefully we’ll get it improved in the next episodes. And we can assume that with results like these Lucas will decide to give 3D conversion another try with the next episode from the saga, because these numbers seem encouraging.

Up until now there haven’t been that many old movies brough back to life on the big screen converted in 3D, there have been quite a lot of disappointments coming from new movies that were shot in 2D and then converted to 3D… and not that well converted. And until now animations were the ones getting the 3D threatment in terms of conversions from 2D to 3D, and the results that Disney’s The Lion King 3D and Beauty and the Beast 3D were so good (in terms of numbers) that Disney decided to convert more of its animated movies and bring them in 3D on the big screen again. The Lion King converted in 3D is by far the top grossing old 2D animation converted to 3D (and such movie for that matter) surpassing worldwide gross of over $160 million dollars so far. But now that the Star Wars Episode 1 3D conversion is old news, all eyes are directed on the upcoming digitally re-mastered 3D conversion of James Cameron’s Titanic that will be re-released in early April to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the ship Titanic setting sail.