3-D's Nuts!

I wasn't alive in the 1950s and 60s, but the Cap'n is slowly understanding why the 3-D fad died off the first time around. And we haven't had our eyeballs sodomized by Avatar yet!

Like the remake, if the zombified corpse called Hollywood sniffs anything that turns brains to dollars, it fixates and overproduces... wait. Bad metaphor. The desperation is right, the zombie part ties to the desperation... hmmm. Okay, I've got it.

Let's say that Morgan Spurlock decided not to eat ANYTHING for thirty days. Then, on day thirty-one, presuming he hadn't died from malnutrition, he returned to find the only place open in a one thousand mile radius was McDonalds. So he ate it, and had what passes for sustenance, and decided he really liked McDonalds.

Now, McDonald's takes this small sign of appreciation as an indicator that everyone will want AS MUCH McDonald's ALL OF THE TIME, so they start opening more and more fast food joints, cramming the market with their shitty yet affordable food. Perhaps in the short term people love it more, yes, but eventually everyone, including Mr. Spurlock, gets sick of it.

Right now, Hollywood is McDonalds AND Morgan Spurlock. They're desperate for anything that people will like, so they've been throwing just about anything they could find to see what stuck. Right now, the apparent answer is Remakes and Just About Anything in 3-D.

Accordingly, if you look at announcements for movies coming out in the next year, the somewhat limited 3-D market of even two-to-three years ago is about to be flooded. The Three Musketeers, Iron Man 2, Piranha, Drive Angry, Avatar, Halloween 3, Saw VII, Astroboy, A Christmas Carol, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Alice in Wonderland, Shrek 4, Toy Story 3, The Hole, The Gate, Frankenweenie, Tin Tin...

Yeesh! And I doubt this is even close to the number of movies being fast-tracked for 3-D. This is not including the rumored re-releases of George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, Toy Story 1 and 2, and George Lucas' Star Wars Trilogy in three dimensions. Oh yes, they're going back and making those 3-D now too, so we'll enjoy them more.

We've come a long way from Robert Rodriguez releasing Spy Kids 3-D and Sharkboy and Lavagirl, and I'm already a little 3-D'd out. We had two of them at Summer Fest and I'm not even sure I'd want to do one for Horror Fest again this year or any time soon.

The argument against my complaint is that "Demand is high for 3-D now, so if we don't capitalize then people will simply lose interest", leaving Hollywood grasping at straws and continuing to simply make movies we've seen before and not bother changing the title. I get that. On the other hand, flooding the market may temporarily satiate demand and maintain interest, but before too long it becomes passe, the flavor of the month that everyone is into and six months later is being mocked soundly on VH1's "I Love the _____'s."

I'm no marketing genius (believe that; if I were more people would read the blogorium) but there is such a thing as cultivating interest and maintaining it without giving too much too soon. That is possible. Admittedly, it runs the risk of not working (take, for example, wildly successful campaigns for terrible movies like Godzilla and The Phantom Menace), but you can carefully dole out something in a way that brings people back and wanting more. Just because My Bloody Valentine and The Final Destination do well in 3-D doesn't mean EVERY horror movie needs to be in 3-D as soon as possible. Ones that really take advantage or benefit from the process, maybe.

The point I'm trying to make is that even when someone does very well exploiting a gimmick, like a William Castle for example, it's not merely the presence of the gimmick itself that sustains audience interest. I've never seen House on Haunted Hill in "Emergo", but the movie still works aside from the gimmick. Maybe the flying skeleton really did make the difference, but it doesn't rely on the trick to work. If you want to keep 3-D fresh, consider very carefully just how much of the movies being fast-tracked would benefit from the process, of it it's just a cheap gimmick.

Because cheap gimmicks die the faster death. The Creature from the Black Lagoon and House of Wax endure, with or without the glasses.