3D is back. Should we finally figure out what to do with it?
AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER seems to have revived interest in the format, which has progressed technologically, but not necessarily philosophically
Just when you thought 3D was really dead, out from hibernation sprang James Cameron.
Certainly, there have been films released in 3D in the past few years; most of the Marvel movies have still undergone stereoscopic conversions, and nearly all major animated offerings have continued to be made available in the format. But up until the release of Cameron’s long-gestating Avatar: The Way of Water this past December, you could have easily ignored the presence of 3D at the American multiplex. What was a major part of the theatrical ecosystem 10-15 years ago became relegated to one or two sparsely-attended auditoriums at the end of the hall, seemingly confirmed as the passing fad that detractors claimed it was. Premium screens like IMAX and Dolby Cinema largely were no longer booked with 3D versions of films, despite their capacity to show them. One got the sense that the only reason there were any 3D conversions anymore was that certain Asian markets, namely China, still demanded them much more than the U.S.
But then came the Avatar sequel, from 3D’s biggest filmmaker proponent. Audiences largely once again bought into Cameron’s stereoscopic vision as well, with AMC Theatres boasting that 70% of their opening weekend tickets came from premium formats (nearly all of them showing the 3D version) and distributor Disney officially reporting the first frame’s 3D sales at 57% of the total revenue. Now, three months after its initial release, most of the movie’s remaining 1,675 engagements are only showing the 3D version. It’s safe to say that a sizable portion of its $675M-and-counting domestic take has come from 3D ticket surcharges.
This success, paired with strong audience satisfaction in The Way of Water, has instigated the beginnings of a revival in studio interest in exploiting the added revenue stream from 3D in the domestic market. Disney immediately followed up The Way of Water with several TV spots for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania containing voiceover proclaiming “Experience it in 3D!” and even pop-out effects showing figures spilling over the letterboxed aspect ratio to simulate the 3D effect on TV. Additionally, most IMAX screens offered one showtime of Quantumania per day in 3D on opening weekend, which hadn’t been done for a Marvel release in some time. By comparison, the 3D releases of the preceding Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Thor: Love and Thunder felt like formalities, scarcely mentioned in the marketing and publicity campaigns, and not a core component of the North American PLF releases.
Other studios are seemingly following suit. Paramount’s Scream VI is fairly widely available in a 3D conversion, a treatment not afforded to other recent entries in the franchise nor any other American horror film since 2015’s Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension. And while 3D seems to be less of a key asset for Universal and Illumination’s sure-to-be-massive The Super Mario Bros. Movie, it’s worth noting that advance tickets are now widely available for the 3D version, which has not often been the case for animated films in recent years.
Needless to say, it remains to be seen whether today’s audiences buy back into 3D beyond what James Cameron is dishing out. Until The Way of Water and the anniversary re-release of Titanic (which I would have much preferred to have seen in its original 2D presentation had it been made available), I hadn’t even considered going to see anything in the format since 2018’s niche arthouse release Long Day’s Journey Into Night. But we are now very clearly seeing the beginnings of a renewed studio push to sell theatrical 3D experiences, which makes it worth revisiting the question: What do we like and dislike about 3D, anyway? For many of us, these ideas and conversations may be coated in thick mental cobwebs by this point.
Full disclosure: I was never a strong 3D proponent or detractor. I saw plenty of both what I felt were good and bad artistic uses of the technology over the years. Most of my negative feelings towards 3D stemmed from its practical consequences on exhibition. First and foremost, the explosion of 3D – coinciding with the release of the first Avatar in 2009 – spurred the widespread adoption of the Sony 4K dual lens projection system at AMC and Regal cinemas. This projector configuration, intentionally misused by the big exhibitors for cost and labor reasons, resulted in thousands of auditoriums being robbed of the proper illumination levels for standard 2D shows. In other words, 3D projection took 2D movies down with it; as a result, I outright refused to attend many convenient theaters for years, dissatisfied by the presentation. This is largely no longer an issue, as most old Sony 4K units have been decommissioned, though it still rears its head in lower-performing theaters where they haven’t yet been yanked. I recently tried to go see The Fabelmans at the AMC Marina Marketplace 6 in the Los Angeles area, and I was greeted by an image so dim, I immediately bailed on the show. When the first MPA trailer band hit the screen looking more gray than green, I looked up to the projection port-glass and sure enough, the dreaded old Sony twin lens stared back at me.
Second, and still an issue today, is that for spectacle-wearers like myself, the 3D glasses experience is downright unpleasant. Especially with the larger IMAX glasses, it’s impossible to avoid glare bouncing onto one set of lenses – and then the other in turn – from ambient lights in the auditorium when you try to stack the two pairs of glasses on top of one another. And don’t even get me started on when the glasses are reused with IMAX 3D and Dolby 3D. Even though these 3D systems have some clear advantages over RealD 3D, which employs single-use glasses, I have been saddled with scratched and dirty pairs countless times in practice, offsetting whatever benefits they offer.
But I have seen plenty of engaging uses of 3D over the years, and I don’t altogether reject the idea of a renewed 3D push, so long as there is artistic justification (no, I don’t think a conversion of Scream VI counts). What I do want to contemplate here, however, is what the most interesting or compelling uses of 3D could potentially be, because I feel we’ve historically thought about this all wrong. Specifically, I would like to take issue with the common premise that 3D is best used to facilitate audience immersion. Especially during the strong push for 3D roughly 15 years ago, studios and 3D-friendly filmmakers alike commonly espoused the idea that 3D presentation offered a way to bring the viewer in to another world, to make them feel more entrenched in the universe of the movie. This was in diametric opposition, they claimed, to the “old style” of 3D popularized in the 1950s, which hurled objects at the viewer and drew attention to its artifice. The best new 3D, they assured, would make the world and the action of a film feel more real. This has certainly been the perspective that James Cameron has voiced in his countless interviews on the topic:
“I believe 3D is inevitable because it’s about aligning our entertainment systems to our sensory system. We all have two eyes, we all see the world in 3D. And it’s natural for us to want our entertainment in 3D as well.” (Tech Crunch interview)
“Usually, when you go to a movie, your consciousness floats above the film. 3D sucks you in and makes it a visceral experience.” (GQ India interview)
In all my personal experiences with 3D, the Avatar films included, this hasn’t really been the case. In fact, the very shots designed specifically to be “immersive,” with a vast depth of field that emphasizes the expansiveness of a landscape or setting, tend to be those that most draw attention to the 3D effect itself. These are the “oooh” and “aaah” establishing shots that take you out of the frame, raising your consciousness level of the reality that what you’re watching is being projected in a theater. In other words, true cinematic “immersion” is a paradox: to actually be sensorily immersed in a film is so inherently impressive that the illusion itself is almost immediately broken. A film that looks and feels like real-life ceases to be what we think of as a film, and we’re promptly taken out of the experience as a result, if only because it often appears to be an impressive leap forward. Only if all new films looked this way – which would be a radical change in accepted film language – would we begin to accept these attempts at sensory immersion as truly immersive.
But even then, we’d likely still be a long way off from full immersion, as other advancements in film technology further risk breaking the sustained illusion. Among these is “high frame rate” capture and projection, which Cameron has employed for select prints of Avatar: The Way of Water as it makes the 3D image clearer and more fluid. I first saw the movie in 3D in the traditional 24 frames-per-second and was greatly impressed by the visual look of it. The next day, I went to go see the “high frame rate” version, in which much of the film is shown in 48 frames-per-second. This is the same technology that was largely dismissed as disarming and “soap opera-like” when Peter Jackson used it in The Hobbit movies and Ang Lee used it in Gemini Man and Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (both of which had even more frames, 120 per second). Cameron’s version is less visually disarming than those prior experiments, partly because he effectively “slows down” the frame rate to 24fps for many of the quieter, dialogue-driven scenes by duplicating the same frame twice in a row. But it still feels more distracting than immersive. Why is this? After all, capturing more frames should give us greater clarity and therefore more immersion, right?
In concentrating only on the visuals and the aesthetic experience of Avatar: The Way of Water when watching in HFR, I realized where the disconnect in immersion lies. Cameron is entirely right: 3D, and specifically 3D captured in HFR, does a better job of replicating human vision than traditional 2D 24fps photography. But in the case of a movie – and especially in the case of a CGI-dominated fantasy like The Way of Water – the filmmaker is not capturing real-life, but rather, a complete fiction. And whereas the conventions of traditional photography allow us to accept and acclimate to this manufactured world, 3D HFR exposes the lie. It effectively does the opposite of immerse us: instead, it draws our attention to the fact that this is essentially a really expensive form of “dress up.” By giving us the clearest look at the Na’vi to date, Cameron only makes us realize just how not real they actually are. Imagine what environments and characters created for a fraction of The Way of Water’s record-breaking budget would look like, presented this way. Even with AI technology rapidly progressing, we’re a long way off from painting a world that looks truly indistinguishable from reality when blown up on a 60-foot screen and exhibited at 48fps.
This realization, however, makes me excited for how 3D HFR might be more compellingly utilized, chiefly in the documentary space. Some of my favorite applications of 3D to date have been in documentaries, ranging from Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Wim Wenders’ Pina to the concert films Katy Perry: Part of Me and One Direction: This is Us to the nature docs Under the Sea and To the Arctic. This is because documentaries can credibly use 3D technology to enhance their claim to indexicality, as opposed to narrative films, which try to leverage it to sell us on an illusion that isn’t real. The best documentary implementations of the technology have used it to give the viewer more of a spatial perception of the subject(s) they depict. HFR only stands to heighten this visual understanding, providing greater fidelity and clarity of motion, and enriching our perception of the photographic resolution.
Thinking about how supremely challenging the post-pandemic environment for theatrical documentaries has been, this seems like an exciting opportunity to make a case for going to see a documentary in a movie theater again. While there are certainly ways to view HFR content at home, the average moviegoer probably isn’t taking advantage of them, so there would be a real value proposition associated with the technology’s theatrical availability in this context. It’s also worth noting that, whereas Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Pina faced challenges in terms of arthouse adoption of 3D projection back when they were released (in 2010 and 2011, respectively), exhibitors are now much more willing to book specialty content in equipped megaplexes. The possible applications in concert documentaries are also especially exciting – and at something of a renaissance moment for the genre, with two BTS films and Billie Eilish: Live at the O2 Arena commanding respectable grosses in the past year.
Removing HFR from the equation, however, my earlier point still stands: In narrative filmmaking, if 3D is truly immersive, then it’s no longer actually immersive. Thus, if we’re really going to see a revival of interest in the stereoscopic format, my hope is that filmmakers aspire to use it in creative, experimental, and boundary-pushing ways. Despite what he may say about his intent, I think that James Cameron actually does a lot of this in Avatar: The Way of Water, which can really be appreciated in the 24fps 3D version. Some of the framing choices and the camera movement make use of the stereoscopic effect in ways that really spur the viewer’s engagement in the stellar action set-pieces in the film, which appear somewhat unnatural in 2D. This doesn’t mean they’re “immersive,” but it does make for entirely compelling cinema.
So much of the reason that 3D failed and retreated to dormancy in the mid-2010s was that it simply wasn’t being used interestingly enough. Rushed stereoscopic conversions, completely detached from the filmmaker’s intended vision, became commonplace. Again, this ultimately wasn’t about how “immersive” these 3D conversions were, but whether the effect lent anything to the film viewing experience. Hollywood expected moviegoers to pay extra for something that wasn’t additive. Seeing the opportunistic pitches for the 3D versions of Quantumania and Scream VI makes me think the studios never really learned their lesson. But we can thank James Cameron for reminding us that this tool exists, it’s viable, and it’s still ripe for experimentation. If filmmakers are game, the best uses of it could still be yet to come.