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Blue aliens, 10ft tall and armed with bows and arrows, are set to change our world. The extraterrestrial Na’vi are not only the stars of a forthcoming blockbuster film called Avatar, the director James Cameron’s first big movie since Titanic, but also harbingers of a new age of cinema.
For the Na’vi, victims of an Earthling invasion of their primitive planet, are being hailed as the most sophisticated computer-generated 3-D creatures to pop out of a two-dimensional cinema screen.
This is not your grandparents’ 3-D movies from the 1950s, where the audience wore coloured spectacles to see blurry images of men in rubber monster suits. Avatar, a chunk of which was unveiled at a science fiction conference in California last week, is cresting a wave of new 3-D films. The buzz in Hollywood is that it could prove to be a “game-changer” in popular entertainment.
Apart from the 20-minute extract shown to a cheering hall at Comic-Con in San Diego last week, Avatar is being kept under wraps until August 21 — billed as “Avatar Day” — when 15-minute trailers will begin showing in cinemas around the world. Though the film’s premiere will not take place until Christmas, some industry executives already say that it could prove as significant as the 1927 release of The Jazz Singer, in which Al Jolson stunned audiences with sound.
Others are comparing it with Jurassic Park in 1993 when Steven Spielberg wowed us with the first realistic computer-generated dinosaurs. The most enthusiastic predict that within five years 2-D blockbusters will be dismissed as quaint “flatties”.
Ten British cinemas a week are upgrading to the digital projection systems necessary to show the 3-D mayhem heading our way. Rupert Gavin, chief executive officer of Odeon cinemas, says the new 3-D technology is the breakthrough film fans have been waiting for.
“In 2007, Ray Winstone in Beowulf [which was filmed in 3-D] still looked a bit cartoony, but James Cameron has taken it to the next stage. His is an entire live-action world which opens up the new technology for adult films as well as animated family movies,” he said.
Odeon is replacing two-thirds of its celluloid projectors with 3-D digital models, many in time for the Christmas movie season, buoyed by a 15% rise in sales. All the Hollywood studios are producing big-budget 3-D animated movies aimed at the family, and Pixar and Disney say that every new animated film will be now produced in 2-D and 3-D versions.
There are sceptics, however. Critics said the 3-D version of Pixar’s recent hit Up lost some of the colours of the 2-D version. Others write off 3-D as hype, suggesting that, like shaking cinema seats in the 1970s, the novelty will fade quickly.
Nevertheless, test audiences and ticket sales for films such as Ice Age 3 suggest otherwise. Consumers appear willing to pay a premium for the new 3-D — an extra £2 in London — which means the films are accounting for an increasing share of box-office receipts. Jeffrey Katzenberg, Steven Spielberg’s partner in the DreamWorks studio, says it would now be “financially irresponsible” not to shoot an animated film in 3-D.
The craze is rising up the demographic curve: teen-orientated slasher movies such as the next Friday the 13th and Final Destination will scare audiences with axes and heads flying out of the screen. And when the teenagers seek more adult fare, studios hope they will take their expectations of that extra dimension with them.
Avatar, produced by 20th Century Fox, is not a children’s movie and others are already considering 3-D for adult themes. Peter Jackson, who directed The Lord of the Rings trilogy, is blowing up 3-D bombs for a remake of second world war classic The Dambusters.
Is the cinematic dam really about to burst? And if so, why?
THE key breakthrough is the switch from celluloid to digital film-making. The leading modern 3-D digital camera was pioneered by Cameron, who developed a high-definition dual-lens model called the Fusion with Sony.
He used it in 2003 to shoot footage when he returned to the wreck of the Titanic, showing it as the documentary Ghosts of the Abyss in crisp 3-D on the Imax giant screens.
It still took five years for Cameron to merge his camera with other technological advances, such as the “motion capture” computer-wired suit worn by Andy Serkis to mime the slithering movements of Gollum for The Lord of the Rings.
Such breakthroughs do not come cheap: Avatar has already cost $300m to make, eclipsing the last record-holder, Superman Returns.
The three-hour epic, which is based on a story by Cameron and, some say, is a sly critique of the Iraq invasion, could still be a flop, sending 3-D back to cartoon land; but few who have seen footage believe so.
Paul Dergarabedian, who analyses box-office fortunes for the studios, predicts it could be this year’s Dark Knight, the Batman film that made $1 billion.
“This is the movie everyone is salivating to see,” he said. “The studios are happy to see that there are no troublesome A-list stars, although hardcore fans will be happy to see Sigourney Weaver working with Cameron for the first time since Aliens.
It is the test case for this new high-tech approach to film-making. This could change Hollywood economics.”
The technology will also allow cinemas to do more than simply show films. Katzenberg was able to persuade American distributors to invest in upgrading projection systems by telling them that the 3-D technology will frustrate piracy and open up their premises, which are empty 15 hours a day, to other events.
The same is happening in Britain. “We can fill seats with live opera and theatre productions, and football matches could be massive,” said Rupert Gavin of Odeon.
The National Theatre’s production of Phèdre with Helen Mirren was a recent hit in dozens of off-duty cinemas around the world last month, thanks to digital technology. Cost-cutting companies are renting satellite-linked cinemas to host global sales summits. Such events could go 3-D.
Television is trying to catch up, but still has a way to go. There have been experimental 3-D broadcasts, but nothing substantial — partly because of the costs of distributing the high-quality polarised glasses that viewers must still wear.
Last week there were complaints in the US that the flimsy glasses that came with the DVD of the 3-D film Coraline, based on the book by the British fantasy author Neil Gaiman, “burnt out” colour. The DVD came with a warning that it might take five minutes for eyes at home to adjust — not a warning necessary with higher quality cinema specs.
There are several companies working on 3-D plasma television screens that do not require glasses to be worn, but they require the viewer to face the set at a precise angle — which does not make for family-friendly viewing.
The same restrictions apply to the internet. There have been downloadable 3-D snippets but the quality is nothing like that achieved with the new cinema systems. So the multiplexes have a breathing space to stay ahead of the next generation of home-theatre setups.
In Britain it has encouraged the UK Film Council to back its first 3-D movie, Street Dance, in which working-class youths face off against posh dancers from Charlotte Rampling’s “Royal Dance School”. The council is also looking forward to other uses of the technology — such as broadcasting the 2012 Olympics in London in 3-D.
“It could be in cinemas or on television, if the industry has sorted out a common standard by then,” said Peter Buckingham, head of distribution at the council. “Film and TV tend to go together, driving each other on. We may be closer than you think to seeing 3D-ready TV sets on sale.
“Audiences are voting with their feet and saying, if you give me the choice between a 3-D and a 2-D version of the same film then I will completely go with the 3-D.”
As ever, though, technology is not the be-all and end-all, and some Hollywood bigwigs remain wary of the coming storm. “Would 3-D have improved Casablanca or Citizen Kane? I don’t think so,” said one director last week, who said he had just been instructed to reshoot a feature in 3-D halfway through production.
Jerry Bruckheimer, producer of blockbuster hits from Bad Boys to Transformers, said he was “experimenting” with 3-D in his new film G-Force, starring animated ninja-trained guinea-pigs. But even he has his reservations.
“You can have all the technology and special effects you can afford,” said Bruckheimer, “but in the end it’s a story that captures the imagination and characters you love or hate that count.”
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