Posts Tagged ‘How to Train Your Dragon’

With so many bombs like "The Green Hornet" trying to sell 3D (converted no less), which don't even warrant a normally priced ticket, why should we not still consider 3D to be a money-grabbing gimmick that doesn't add enough to the viewing experience to justify the higher ticket price?

Dear Hollywood,

Please stop pushing 3D.

The Hollywood Reporter has revealed that Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides has underachieved in terms of earning first weekend grosses for 3D showings, with more audiences opting for 2D prints. Now, with $90.1 million earned its first weekend in just the U.S., and over $400 million to be earned worldwide by the end of its first full week, the film can hardly be considered unsuccessful. However, numbers show that American audiences’ interest in 3D could be waning. What everyone is trying to figure out is whether fewer 3D tickets sold means audiences are no longer seeing the value in 3D technology or they are becoming less inclined to fork over the extra cash for a 3D ticket.

Guess what Hollywood – if Americans are indeed sick of 3D it’s because of both reasons.

The list of recent movies released in 3D where the extra dimension actually added to the viewing experience is extremely short, including only Avatar, Tron: Legacy, How to Train Your Dragon, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Coraline, and Monster House. Notice how four of those six are 100% animated, and the two “live action” films are ones which were greatly reliant on digital effects to the point where one could justifiably consider them mostly animated as well. This is not a coincidence, and such a pattern does not help the argument that 3D is the future of the medium. Personally, I won’t give that claim any consideration until I see a truly live action film wow me like the six just mentioned.

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"The Social Network" has gotten very high praise for its writing, but is it the best written movie so far this year?

So far this year we’ve enjoyed the emergence of several very well made movies, such as Toy Story 3, Inception, Shutter Island, How to Train Your Dragon, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Cyrus, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and the recently released The Social Network, among others. Exactly what makes these movies so well made are an innumerable amount of things both big and small, not the least of which are their direction, editing, acting quality, and art direction. But with every film, when you get right down to it, what really makes or breaks everything is the writing. A phenomenal director and editor tandem can sometimes get past a so-so script, such as with Steven Spielberg and Michael Kahn with Jurassic Park, but the vast majority of the time the quality of the writing is what determines how good everything else can potentially be.

So far it would appear that the two movies that are being praised the most for their writing quality are Chris Nolan’s Inception and Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network. It seems like every review of the latter has dedicated a whole paragraph to dote upon this particular aspect, crediting both Sorkin and his source material (Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires). The former has received sterling reviews as well, though because of how intentionally ambiguous the film is some critics were hesitant to award it prematurely. In those critics’ defense, it is indeed harder to defend a story’s craftsmanship when its coherence is questionable and the overall theme and thesis lend themselves to expansive debate.

Can the stories of these two movies be compared? Read the rest of this entry »

Disney's "Alice in Wonderland" has made the majority of its profits off 3D ticket sales, but did the technology justify the higher ticket price?

There is a big debate going on about the influx of 3D movies that has been going on the past few years, and continues going on strong. Some claim that the technology has already reduced itself to a gimmick, while others believe wholeheartedly that it is the future of cinema. Who is right? Can anyone be wrong? In order to come to any kind of conclusion, we first have to look at the facts.

Much of this topic comes down to economics. An article in Variety by Pamela McClintock examines this angle in-depth, and answers a lot of questions regarding why the film industry is so keen on this latest and greatest technology. To put it simply, there is a lot of money in it. The unfathomable success of James Cameron’s Avatar has driven a number of studios into a frenzy, spurring them to make some 2D movies into 3D in order to cash in on the popularity. The upcoming Clash of the Titans (April 2^nd) is one such film that was made into 3D at the 11^th hour. For some, these half-baked conversions are one of the major points of contention. The claim is that such last-minute conversions are adding to the thinking that 3D technology is nothing more than a money-grabbing gimmick. This may be true, but consider this: producing a film in 3D from the get-go adds $20 million to its budget almost automatically, while converting a film into 3D during post-production only adds $10 million to the budget (some studios even claim $5 million). The issue over post-production conversions, then, may not entirely be an issue about getting more money from audiences, but also about saving money. So, it is not completely about the first goal of business (making profit) but also the third (reducing cost). But what about the second goal (increasing revenue)? Read the rest of this entry »