This time last year, there were whispers among film executives and industry-watchers that 3-D cinema had worked its way down a blind alley with its pockets full of cash. That summer, the format seemed like the answer to all of Hollywood's problems: shrinking ticket sales, video piracy, home-theater viewing. The studios had put out a run of record-smashing, premium-priced blockbusters: Avatar, Alice in Wonderland, How to Train Your Dragon, Clash of the Titans, Shrek Forever After, and Toy Story 3—a half-dozen 3-D movies that earned more than $2 billion in domestic sales. Yet by the end of August 2010, the future of cinema was starting to look unsteady on its feet. Box-office returns from the next wave of 3-D films were disappointing. The revival needed reviving.
An analysis published in Slate last August showed that the patient might already have flat-lined. The profitability of 3-D cinema had dropped since the start of the vogue several years earlier, and more recent films were barely breaking even on their 3-D screenings. Now we've got another year's worth of data—12 months' more evidence that the medium is in peril. According to a New York Times business story from June, waning enthusiasm for 3-D has brought the vultures circling, with shares of DreamWorks Animation, the studio managed by Jeffrey "2-D films are going to be a thing of the past" Katzenberg, in free-fall. Shares of RealD, one of the big players in stereo projection technology, have also been in a tailspin, losing 70 percent of their value since May.
Anyone would have realized he was dead, just one look at those staring eyes," says Grace Kelly's character in Dial M For Murder, the Hitchcock thriller that became one of the last mainstream 3-D features to be produced during an earlier cycle of boom and bust. By the time of that film's release in 1954, the first great fad for stereo cinema had perished without much ceremony. By all appearances, its 21st-century descendent has met a similar fate.
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Originally Posted by gamevet
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