Tag Archives: 3D

Embracing IMAX for 2D and not 3D

An article over at Movieline.com talks about how “more and more evidence suggests that audiences are both showing a preference for IMAX and happily forgoing often-reviled 3-D visuals.”

Personally for me if a movie films scenes with IMAX cameras to take advantage of the bigger picture it can offer, like Christopher Nolan did  with the Dark Knight did, I am more willing to pay for that experience than I am with 3D.  For me I don’t see 3D as a big attraction or something that I care to spend the extra money on .  While 3D can add some value to movies, overall it just does not add enough to a movie where I would regularly pay the higher 3D ticket price for that experience.

IMAX to me I think can add enough value when the film makers film at least part of their movies using IMAX cameras, some of the recent examples of that are Dark Knight like I mentioned and Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol. The more immersive world they can create normally for action scenes to me is overall normally worth the extra price if I am already interested in the movie.  While I don’t always choose the IMAX screening I certainly normally consider it in the movies that take proper advantage of it.  To truly see what IMAX filmed scenes can bring to a movie see the picture below and how much more detail IMAX brought to the screen.

Image via Slashfilm.com

This part from the article has some good stats on performance of 3D vs 2D showings of the movie The Lorax. (Emphasis mine)

Other telling statistics came with the hit film The Lorax, whose hefty $70 million opening far exceeded expectations. Industry investment analyst Richard Greenfield found that while 3-D screens represented a nearly two-to-one majority of The Lorax’s theater count, the grosses expose a nearly even split between 2-D and 3-D. The per-screen average shows that more money was made in conventional screenings, a stunning figure once you factor in the inflated 3-D ticket prices. That breakdown means that while 60 percent of the screenings were displayed in 3-D, 60 percent of the audience watched in 2-D.

via The IMAX Old Wave: How Audiences and Filmmakers Are Embracing the 2-D Mega-Screen – Movieline.

 As that helps show I am not the only one that prefers 2D over 3D whether for cost reasons or if people just don’t like 3D itself.  It will be interesting to see if and how this trend continues in the future both in terms of movies filming at least partly with IMAX cameras and how prevalent 3D movies stay in the next few years.

To read more about how Dark Knight scenes came about in IMAX check out this article over at Slashfilm.com: How The Dark Knight Went IMAX