3D avatar is back, but will it be more than just a novelty?

But it doesn’t have to be that way. And who knows? Maybe this time it won’t.

With the arrival of Avatar: The Way of Water This December, for the first time since the release of Alfonso Cuarón, audiences will be actively guided to 3D screenings heaviness In 2013.

avatars Director James Cameron has always been one of the staunchest supporters of technology. On Thursday, he told attendees at CinemaCon, the annual convention for cinema owners, that his new film featured “the most stunning 3D available” that would “push the boundaries” of the medium “even further” than the original avatarreleased in 2009 – which remains the highest-grossing film ever released, by a margin of around $40 million.

After two grueling years, this sounds like what the industry has been praying for: a must-attend cultural event that its customers can’t stream from their couches.

The history of 3D movies is cyclical and it is no coincidence that the first commercial boom came in the 1950s as studios again looked for ways to stave off the rise of television.

There is a prevailing view that 3D movies have always been cheesy, but that hasn’t been the case. The first batch included a spectacular MGM musical, kiss me kateas well as works by pantheon authors such as Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, and Douglas Sirk.

The fad burned out then for the same reasons it did in the early 2010s: showing it off properly took skill, and when you didn’t, the experience ranged from drab to excruciating.

Many of the more well-known downsides of 3D, from eye strain and headaches to darker, fuzzier images, only occur when a projector isn’t properly calibrated.

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For example, the light level wasn’t set high enough, or the two images needed to create an illusion of depth are slightly misaligned.

But even in the 1950s, when up to three projectionists could be deployed for a single 3D showing (one for each projector and one for the stereo sound), such errors were becoming increasingly common – and the glasses themselves being the only part of it The process, which audiences encountered directly, was given a bad name by association.

When the CinemaScope format was released in 1953, 20th Century Fox touted it as “the modern marvel you can see without glasses,” and as widescreen flourished, 3D withered at the same time.

After the release of avatar, these problems were even more pronounced as studios rushed to post-convert existing unreleased movies to 3D to meet explosive consumer demand. Essentially, this consisted of digitally stretching the existing 2D image over a plane of virtual blobs and bumps that moved to approximate the objects imaged above.

The technique has since been refined, but in the early days the results were often offensively ugly and crude.

Customers became increasingly aware of the scam and enthusiasm for the format waned.

The British Film Institute’s statistical yearbook records that 3D screenings accounted for 24 per cent of total annual box office receipts in 2010, and where films could be viewed in both directions, 3D tickets outsold 2D almost three to one.

By 2018, however, that had dropped to just three percent, and the format’s descent into novelty was complete.

But when films are actually conceived with three dimensions in mind – when they are shot and edited to respect the strengths and limitations of the technology – the results can be astounding.

And if Avatar: The Way of Water washes out more of the quality in some movies Life of Pi: Shipwreck with Tiger or Dreddbring the comeback

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