3Don't: Ways to Improve Your Moviegoing in 2011

I've been trying to think of ways to incorporate my experiences as a cinema worker into this blog, so that it's not just reviews of individual films. How about something New Year's resolution-y (as Buffy might say), like ways to become a better moviegoer in 2011? Consider this the first in an occasional series.

3D is a complete rip-off.

It exists to pad box office revenues, not improve your moviegoing experience. Good movies don't need it, and it won't save a bad one.

In 2008, only one of the top ten films was in 3D, Pixar's WALL-E. In 2009, two of the top ten, the juggernaut of Avatar and Pixar's Up, were in 3D. This year, five of the top ten, and 11 of the top 20 were 3D (although no breakdown of how much of their grosses were from 3D, and which were from 2D prints of the same films): Toy Story 3 was number one with $415 million (the quality of the story, not just the 3D, was the driver), Alice in Blunderland (2), Despicable Me (7), Shrek Forever Crappier (8), How to Train Your Dragon (9), Tangled (11), Crap of the Titans (which was an added after-effect 3D hack-job at 12), Megamind (14), Tron; Legacyzzzz (15), The Hopefully-Last Airbender (one of the worst-reviewed, and worst 3D post-production add-ons of the year, at 16) and Jackass 3D (20). (These are all domestic grosses and rankings.)

3D artificially inflates a movie's grosses due to the added fees charged by each movie theater. My theater charges an extra $3.50 for adults and $2.00 for kids. AMC charges an extra $4 per ticket, and an extra $6 per IMAX 3D ticket (and some of the AMC's billing themselves as IMAX are not even true IMAX). You might think that's good financial news for theaters, right?

Well, the rub is that opening weekend grosses are split 90-10, in favor of the studios. Putting that into real numbers, let's use last year's Alice in Wonderland, Tim Burton's craptacular 3D outing which definitely owes inflated 3D pricing for its second-place finish in the 2010 box office standings. Rounding the numbers, it had a $116 million opening weekend ($334 million total), of which 90% ($104.4 million) went back to it perpetrators at Disney, leaving $11.6 million to be divided by 3,728, the number of screens it opened on that weekend. For each screen, that equals a whopping $3,111.

Box office grosses, however, are not the best indicator of a film's actual attendance number, though. Let's do some more math.

As an exhibitor, you'd gross the same amount on a 3D film that attracts 1000 people ($1800, 10% of an $18 ticket total of $18,000), versus a 2D film that attracts 1241 people. However, and this is critical, with the 3D audience of 1000, you lose the potential to sell an extra 241 people concessions, so if your theater averages $3 in concessions sales per person, that's an additional $723 to add to the $1800, a 40% bump. If you have an "underperforming" 3D title tying up one of your big houses, you're hosed, because the bread-and-butter of movie theaters is the popcorn-and-butter your guests are gobbling up in the dark. (More on this in a future blog.) When the Studios look at the Rentrak numbers on Monday mornings, they only care about their grosses, not how much popcorn money the exhibitor lost out on with 20% fewer people walking through the door, which is how you can get stuck still having to carry a moribund 3D title that actually has fewer attendees than a 2D title you can drop.


Keep in mind also that theaters have had to make huge capital investments in new digital projectors and in those 3D glasses. At my theater, we have expensive, state-of-the-art, reusable glasses, which require staff to distribute, sanitize and account for every single damn pair of them, every single day we sell a 3D ticket. Loss of even a single pair costs us money. (Other theaters use disposable glasses, which in theory are recycled, but I can't speak to that from my own experience. And the glasses all suck, just in different ways.)

But one thing you can be sure of, no matter what kind of glasses you're wearing, the end result does not justify the hassle of the glasses themselves or the added expense. Next time you're at a 3D movie, take the glasses off. What do you see? A picture that's about 30% brighter than the one you're watching, for starters. Also, little kids don't always like the glasses, even though a sizable number of 3D films are geared to the under-10 set. Nothing like handing a toddler a pair of 3D glasses and hoping that his distracted parents don't let him break them -- or that they feel "entitled" to let Junior have at 'em after feeling ripped off on the surcharge.

Except for an occasional scene of flying, no film I have seen in 3D gained anything by the process. And in animation, it does add a little roundness of dimensionality, but better animation (and scripts) could achieve that dimensionality without the 3D. Pixar films will -- and do -- do excellent business, with or without 3D.

My strongest recommendation to slow down the onslaught of 3D is to actively seek out and choose to see 2D versions of the same films. This is especially true for children's films, where the added fees can make moviegoing an expensive event for families (although not as much as other forms of entertainment -- another blog to come), or the extra fees are being spent on tickets, instead of popcorn. And fanboys, you guys who are already drooling for The Green Lantern next weekend, put your Spider-Man wallets away. Unless it's an NC-17 movie titled Scarlett Johansson Taking a Shower, you're not getting your money's worth, either.

I was hoping a call for a quasi-boycott movement might work. According to a MPAA report on Theatrical Motion Picture Statistics for 2009, only 10% of the U.S. population is construed as "frequent" moviegoers, which means one or more times per month, but this group accounted for half the movie tickets purchased. Even if only 10% of frequent moviegoers stopped going to 3D movies, it would have a chilling effect on the box office. But 2011 promises to yield a steady -- at times, spurting -- stream of yet more 3D.

I was poking around the Internet, doing a little research for this piece, when I found an article published in The Huffington Post  today, entitled "2011: The Year 3D Kills Mainstream Moviegoing?," which had an excellent list of all the 3D films slated for release in 2011: The Green Hornet, Sanctum, Gnomeo and Juliet, Drive Angry, Justin Bieber: Never Say Never, Mars Needs Moms, Thor, Priest, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Kung Fu Panda 2, Green Lantern, Cars 2, Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II, Captain America, The Smurfs, Conan the Barbarian, Fright Night, Spy Kids 4, Final Destination 5, Piranha 3DD, Dolphin Tale, The Three Musketeers, Contagion, Puss in Boots, Immortals, Happy Feet 2, Arthur Christmas, Hugo Cabret, Sherlock Holmes 2, Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked, and The Adventures of Tin-Tin. (List from Scott Mendelson's piece in today's Huffington Post.)

One of the interesting things that the article points out is that of these 32 titles, 26 of them are slated to be released in a 34-week period, some of them against each other. And it also posits that this flood of product may effectively shut down the option for theaters to also run the same titles in 2D (something we are often able to do successfully, especially with kid's movies).

I can safely say that I have little to no interest in about 95% of these movies, regardless of their format (nor did the makers of the films have any interest in or expectation of my attendance), but a few stand out as having broad enough appeal to make my job those weekends a living hell.

My co-workers and I got what amounted to an early Christmas gift when Warner Bros. aborted their 3D release of the first part of the Harry Potter finale this past November, mostly due to the crap quality of the transfer process (as the film was not originally shot in 3D). Warners took a lot of heat, justifiably, for the poor quality of the Clash of the Titans make-a-quick-buck transfer and didn't dare have Potterites go Voldemort on them if they did the same to HP. Those Potter films are already shot so dark they'd probably disappear with the 3D overlay, and both parts of Deathly Hallows were shot together, so let's hope they balk again come July.

The Pirates weekend was always going to be a drag because those movies are so effing long (plus about 8 minutes of credits) its hard for theaters to program the showtimes. Now it will be a drag, plus with thousands of 3D glasses to wash. Arggh, indeed. Cars 2, like all Pixar movies, will be huge.

But Contagion, slated for release in October, is a thriller starring Matt Damon, Marion Cotillard, Kate Winslet, Bryan Cranston, Jude Law and Elliot Gould, among many others, and is clearly not geared at teenyboppers. It's directed by Steven Soderbergh, for crying out loud. What are we going to see, 3D shots of spores in petri dishes?

I'm begging you, stop going to 3D movies. Now.