Saturday, November 10, 2012

Yay or Nay? Rereleasing movies in 3D

There has been a new trend on the rise over the past few years in which major studios will take some of their best known and best loved movies and rerelease them in theaters for the (insert multiple of 10) anniversary. The most recent ones of course, being Titanic, Star Wars, and many of Disney's classic movies of the 90's. While I do think that sounds great, there is a slight problem that I have with it: They are all in 3D. I've already made it clear how I feel about the format, so you can already tell where this is going. Here's my problem, 3D is such an expensive tool and hardly ever does it actually pay off. The best uses of it have oddly enough been in animated films, rather than big action pictures like Avatar or The Avengers. My real question is why? Why would they feel the need to convert it to shitty 3D when they could easily just say "Hey guys! We are going to put Jurassic Park back into the theaters... Go see it!" It would cost the studios next to nothing, and it's not like they are reshowing movies that didn't score well at the box office. The movies I listed above are all ones that everyone and their mother have scene, and I guarantee you we would have no problem paying to see them again on the big screen. You don't need to convert them to 3D to give us the incentive  we loved these movies when we first saw them 10, 20 years ago, and we'll love them just as much now. If anything, it gives younger viewers the feeling of what it felt like to see it for the first time on the big screen, and for older viewers, it brings back those old memories of when they first saw it. In fact, that's exactly what they did when they released movies like Memento, Scarface and Lord of the Rings, and people went to go see them. Not as many, mind you, but that had more to do with the fact that only a few theaters were showing Memento, and it wasn't very widely advertised. I only know about it because I saw it on Chris Nolan's fan page on facebook. But that's beside the point. So why am I bringing this up? Well, I just saw an ad that said they are going to be putting Jurassic Park back into the theaters in April. At first, I thought "Wow, this is awesome!" I freaking loved those movies when I saw them in 4th grade on DVD, just imagine how awesome they would look on a huge ass theater screen... But then I saw that it was being converted to 3D, and again, I just had to question what the point of it was. Especially with a movie like Jurassic Park. 3D was supposed to be about creating an experience, and Jurassic Park never really felt like an experience to me. The one argument that I have heard for this is that "It's all about money" but not even that argument makes sense. Like I said before, the only thing the studio would have to say it "Hey everyone, we are putting this movie back into theaters for a couple of weeks, it's going to be exactly the same as when it first came out, we hope you enjoy it!", it would cost the studio a lot less than it would to convert it, and it's a pretty safe bet that audiences would go see it again, if not for nostalgia.

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