Why 3D is a scam

Image result for 3d glasses movie

It's everywhere. It seems as if every film coming out these days is available with 3D glasses. This of course has a lot to do with money. Ever since James Cameron's groundbreaking "Avatar" came out & stormed the Box Office, the studios wanted to take advantage of the 3D medium by releasing every mediocre effort with an extra pair of $3 glasses included with your ticket. When conceived, most of these movies were not meant for 3D viewing, compared to James Cameron's film which was born and bred as a 3D experience. Don't waste your money watching 99% of movies in 3D, it is not essential & the film does not benefit in any way shape or form from it. 

Owen Gleiberman skillfully tries to defend Ang Lee's misbegotten "Billy Lynn" and its groundbreaking use of High Frame Rates: 

"For 10 years now, all of us have lined up, like joylessly dutiful junior-high students, to watch 3D movies. Once in a while the results have been spectacular (the obvious example: “Avatar,” that glowing extravaganza of light-show immersion), but 97 percent of the time, in movies from “Journey to the Center of the Earth” to “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” to “Alice in Wonderland” to “Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience” to “Clash of the Titans” to “Resident Evil: Afterlife” to “Tron: Legacy” to “Thor” to “Hugo” to “John Carter” to “Texas Chainsaw 3D,” going to a 3D movie has meant sitting there in those glasses, taking in images that are always a little darker and more murky than you want, images that don’t, in the end, really look “3D,” all for the sake of a rote sensation of “popping” gimmickry. I don’t think I’m alone in saying that in those 10 years, I have only rarely seen a 3D movie that didn’t work just as well (if not better) in a non-3D format."

"The 3D “revolution” has been a listless, half-baked experience, and the more it went on, the more clear it became that the ostensible reason for it — a way to make movies competitive in a marketplace of increasingly distracted eyeballs — was, to a degree, an excuse. The underlying motivation was that ticket prices could be jacked up. Now, with “Billy Lynn,” along comes a movie — one movie! — that truly tries to change the game. And it’s treated as a pariah. What makes the outright dismissal of “Billy Lynn” especially ironic is that we live in an era when the dream of virtual reality is perpetually being nattered about, and in ways (after 25 years of nattering) that dream is starting to come into being, and once you get past the tech lingo that’s what this movie is: an attempt to take the spirit of virtual reality right onto the big screen."

I agree and I would add that I can count in a single hand the amount of movies that have come out since "Avatar" that actually benefited from the 3D treatment: Cameron's "Avatar," Ang Lee's "Life Of Pi," Martin Scorsese's "Hugo," Robert Zemeckis' "The Walk" and Alfonso Cuarron's "Gravity." That's it, that's all. 3D is otherwise a major studio scam that hasn't materialized as planned in terms of artistry, that's why, supposedly, Cameron is trying to find another way to attract people for his "Avatar" sequels. In October he teased that the films might be in 3D without even having to wear the glasses. Is that even doable? 


The reason why studios are releasing every release in 3D is simple: money. The 3D glasses make the movie ticket 3$ more expensive, meaning that the average 12$ ticket price gets boosted up to 15$ for 3D. 

For the time being I'll just have to suck it up and watch movies whichever way they give them to me or as Gleiberman so well put it "sitting there in those glasses, taking in images that are always a little darker and more murky than you want, images that don’t, in the end, really look “3D,” all for the sake of a rote sensation of “popping” gimmickry."