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You may remember reading this article. In case you didn’t and are too lazy to click the link, Disney are now releasing four more classic Disney films, but adding their awesome and amazing Disney Digital 3D. This started with The Lion King (in 3D), undoubtedly the greatest Disney Animated Classic of all time, which should still be in a cinema near you. Now, according to IMDb, this film has, to date, taken around $86M. This is for an 18 year old film which most of us own on DVD anyway, which has already been re-released into cinemas in boring digital at some point during the 2000s. This 3D re-release, and its resultant success is truly astonishing, and it delivers a crushing blow to original film making.
Why is this? I hear you baying from the mountains. This is because of two reasons: one – it is released in 3D, which is both evil and sadistic (as well as being an utter waste of everyone’s time and money) and two – it detracts from the creative cinema making. Now, there are a number of much better complaints about 3D than you are likely to get from me out there, especially the excellent Mark Kermode (@kermodemovie) who talks about this, a lot, in a much angrier and funnier way than I could muster, specifically in his newest book which is well worth a read. No, today, we will be talking about how re-releasing the greatest Disney film of all time, in 3D, starts a tragic slide into mundane mediocrity and all out blandness. The entire ‘Disney destroys the movie industry’ argument can be summed up by the statement: “Hey, I fancy a piece of that pie”.
It apparently took the Disney team about four months to complete the conversion, using a team that would have been about 400 people, including animators and other people who do things to animations to make them move… probably a couple of magicians. Using extrapolation, guesswork and margin of error, it is probably fair to put an upper threshold of $10M as a price for these four months of work. As such, Disney has made a profit, to date, of $76M. An impressive sum, considering how little work it took to reproduce this, it really is EASY MONEY.
You can now understand some of the business reasons behind this re-release, and why Disney has have since chosen to see which other animated classics they can bring back to milk some more money out of. You can also further understand why some other studio bosses may be interested in re-releasing some of their classic films as well, but why does this ruin movie making? Well, really, how can it not? Those 400 animators et. al, who spent four months re-drawing the same images as 18 years ago could be investing their time animating the ‘Super Happy Fun Gang’ feature length movie, which would undoubtedly take billions in the box office. Re-releasing original films kills originality, because bosses have the easy decision of choosing which proven classic they are going to reproduce, rather than which riskier original film they are going to sign off on. It’s going to get worse as well, they are already rolling out Star Wars, Titanic, and even Top Gun (seriously, they really are), just in case people thought that long lingering stares whilst ‘Take my Breath Away’ rumbles on and on is just a bit bland in boring 2D. This doesn’t include the probably countless other films that I haven’t found during my cursory search.
We have bred a generation of lazy film producers. For every Inception, that a director has to battle to get the green light for, there is a re-release, or even worse, a bad film with a huge expensive marketing team plugging it, like Pirates of the Caribbean 4 (in 3D) or Transformers 3 (in 3D). I swear that if they filmed Johnny Depp flogging a dead horse with a whip for 90 minutes, in 3D, and called it ‘Pirates of the Caribbean 5: The Battle of the Stallion (where Captain Jack Sparrow has to overcome his own morals in order to complete a desecrating ritual in order to save the world), people would still pay $12 to see it, making it another commercial success, rather than the bomb it should be. And this is because we are told to see it, albeit told very well, and not because the film is actually any good at all.
The worst thing about it all is that I really don’t think anyone cares. We all think 3D re-releases are an amazing idea, that the Lion King is actually better in its duller, less sharp and protruding form, and that Johnny Depp flogging a horse would be a fantastic watch. We don’t think that it is a disgrace that we are expected to pay through the nose to see a film we already own at home instead of seeing the next storytelling masterpiece in the screen next door. I can honestly say that, unless there is a significant change in the technology, I will never, ever, see another 3D film and neither should you. Because if you do, you are an idiot. You are watching something that retracts from the movie quality, gives you a sore head, is dark and adds something that you barely notice. You are seeing what you are told to see, rather than what common sense suggests you should.
And you know what, if you really want to see something in 3D… go to the theatre.
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