Movies to go 3D in 2010 – gawd I hope not.

I understand that the movie industry is trying to find whatever they can to both increasing the number of people going to the movies as well as a way to try and stop movie piracy but this idea of counting on 3D movies to save their asses is not going to be their holy grail.

It’s not so much that movies currently in production are getting a 3D make-over or that any new movie in the pipeline is being rewritten to become a 3D movie but apparently movie companies are going back to the vault to re-release 3D versions of old movies.

I get that Avatar has prompted everyone to rethink their opinions about 3D movies but that doesn’t mean that the same process will work for future, current or past movies. As Alex Billington wrote in a post over at FirstShowing.com about this threatening trend

What would James Cameron think about all of this? We know that he doesn’t like converting live-action movies shot on regular cameras to 3D. Late last year, he publicly criticized Tim Burton for doing this with Alice on Wonderland, saying that it “doesn’t make any sense to shoot in 2D and convert to 3D.” So although it’s his beautiful movie Avatar that is causing Hollywood to go 3D crazy, I have a feeling that he wouldn’t be happy with everything they’re doing now. The studio execs are all hungry for 3D and are going to convert almost everything they can (including summer tentpoles). But will the 3D even look good? Probably not.

“You wouldn’t want to remake Star Wars, or Close Encounters, just because you can do it in 3D. It’s bad. Then you’re just back into terrible remakes of good movies,” producer Gavin Polone told The Wrap. Polone is developing the sequel to Zombieland, which as we already know will be in 3D as well. “Zombieland makes a lot of sense — it’s an action movie, there’s stuff coming at the camera. We’ll write to it. You don’t want to make a heavy drama that way.” Of course he’s right, but I don’t think that’s the concern. My concern is that Hollywood is going to convert every damn action movie to 3D just because Avatar made over $100 million.

This is another fine example of “just because we can do it doesn’t mean we should”.