A blog about 3D cinema

As we enter a new season of movie-going, the Chinese box-office continues to buck worldwide trends in 3D movie attendance. A month ago, the industry had written off  Pacific Rim  as a well-intentioned exercise in geek-pandering . Jurassic Park 3D  had proved that audiences were never going to go crazy for 3D re-releases. Monsters University was a middling Pixar effort. Midway through September though, China has re-written the history books for all three films, and again challenged expectations of the global audience for 3D. Pacific Rim 's experience was the most startling for the industry: a gigantic movie in every sense of the word, it was always destined to do earn more "internationally" than "domestically". It's reasonably common for big Hollywood action pictures to earn 60% of their total gross in the wider worldwide marketplace, and the other 40% or so of their gross comes from the avidly movie-going State-side domestic audience. What no-one ex...

Background: Pacific Rim is Guillermo Del Toro's first film in 5 years. Much ink has already been spilled about his near-misses directing The Hobbit  film  trilogy   and the potential James Cameron / Tom Cruise adaptation of  At The Mountains Of Madness . Thwarted project after thwarted project, it seemed Del Toro just couldn't catch a break. Luckily, the big man had a big plan: direct a big film about big robots fighting big monsters. For all  Pacific Rim 's high-minded intentions, the movie's essentially Del Toro's love letter to the likes of Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla; his long-simmering kaiju vs mecha tale. So, how'd he fare? Was his 'boyhood dream' picture better than Peter Jackson's King Kong , or Spielberg's Jurassic Park ? More pressingly for 3Defence, is its 3D any good? Post-Converted 3D: For a long time, Del Toro voiced a hedged opinion towards adding 3D to his films. In pre-production for his version of  The Hobbit he started...