3D really may be becoming the scourge of cinema but truthfully, it is on the decline. In the past month we’ve had three, 3D films completely sink at the box office: Fright Night, Conan the Barbarian and Spy Kids 4. Other films that were released in 3D: Despicable Me, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 and Pirates of the Caribbean On Stranger Tides all garnered higher ticket sales in 2D rather than 3D and overall, the audience demand is down.
So now studios have to come up with new ways to continue their current trend, its valuable for them because it costs more to watch 3D, as patrons will know. So their plan now is to seemingly re-release old, big box office hits in 3D. Coming soon we have The Lion King, next year we have Star Wars Episode I The Phantom Menace coming back to our screens (yay) and in the same year, James Cameron‘s Titanic will be re-released in the stereoscopic format (the biggest, most irritating, most contradictory decision ever made by a filmmaker).
The next film to follow the conversion craze is Top Gun. Tony Scott‘s vapid if entertaining jet fighter thriller starring Tom Cruise is going through the conversion house of Legend3D and then to a cinema near you. Legend3D is the company which brought the masterpieces The Green Hornet, Priest and The Smurfs to your 3D screens, all of which had bloody awful conversion jobs. So the signs are good so far. 4 minutes have already been screened in Amsterdam and Rob Hummel, the CEO, is very confident it will be good:
I think Top Gun lends itself to 3D due to the aerial flight. You can have fun with 3D by bringing things off the screen if they are not attached to the edge of the screen.
Honestly, this is utter bilge. If Top Gun lends itself to 3D, then it would have been shot in 3D. The aerial flights you know will look bad because 3D in a conversion job does not bring depth, it brings varying plains of flatness. Converted films looks flat, with animation it doesn’t matter because it was made in a computer and you can go back into animation files. With live action, shot on celluloid, you have to put it into a computer and cut it out. And it looks cut out.
Clash of the Titans showed this. It looked really bad as people’s heads looked as if they were separate from their bodies. In the Top Gun flying scenes it will look like an air fix model flying over paper. This is not an artistic decision, this is a money making decision, designed to squeeze more money out of proven money making films to further convince audiences that 3D is here to stay. It isn’t. Re-releasing films in 3D to show us that the format is wanted by audiences is fooling no one.
Top Gun 3D will apparently be here in early 2012. Bring it on.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter