A blog about 3D cinema

Background: Ask anyone of Generation Y "what's the oldest film you've ever seen?" and there's a very good chance that (after some prodding) the answer is  The Wizard Of Oz . The Victor Fleming film was released in 1939, with World War II a month away from breaking out in Europe. Bizarrely - considering its legacy nowadays - Oz was something of a commercial misfire for MGM at the time. One of the studio's most lavish and expensive productions, it took a few re-releases for The Wizard Of Oz to fully recoup its costs and, more importantly, to be seen by subsequent generations as a landmark event in cinema. The better part of a century later, Warner Brothers now owns the film's rights, and Dorothy's had more "special anniversary box-sets" released than 3Defence cares to count. Warners probably figured out that, after fans have already bought the film on VHS, DVD and Blu-Ray in 2009, they needed to do something particularly special this time ...

Alfonso Cuarón's upcoming 3D film Gravity has critics spellbound, and looks to be this year's "Must-See 3D Film". Set miles above Earth, the film stars George Clooney and Sandra Bullock as a pair of astronauts who... have to deal with gravity after a high-speed encounter with space debris. Gravity  premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month, and immediately started generating Oscar-buzz from the dumbstruck audience. It sounds like cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki 's first 3D outing is a doozy, technically-speaking. Breathless reviewers have described long, unbroken, takes that last in the range of 10 - 15 minutes. HitFix's Drew McWeeny appropriately summed up most people's reactions : "It is increasingly rare that I look at an effects-heavy film and don't know immediately how they did it. With Gravity , I'm not even sure what was real and what wasn't." Indeed, if you watch any of the film's tra...

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...

Over the weekend, Fox showed off 3D footage for X-Men: Days Of Futures Past , The Wolverine  and Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes . Most of that footage has so far remained in the San Diego Comic Con halls, but Fox did release this sneaky piece of - literally - viral marketing.   It's a cute play on the recent  Designed By Apple   ad, with similarly noodling piano and swooshy animations: I was a big fan of Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes , and are hoping the team involved knock its sequel (which is technically also a prequel) out of the park. What do you think, are you ready for some damned dirty  3D apes?

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...

We don't talk about 3D TV much on this site, because we're technically a site about 3D Film. This week though, serious news broke that might very well have an impact on the future of both the cinematic medium and its televised equivalent. So, we interrupt usual film-based discussion to take a brief look into 3D TV and its - now somewhat perilous - future. Post- Avatar, it seemed that movie theaters were guaranteed 3D movie-going successes. All eyes (literally) turned towards the home theater industry, to see whether TVs would be able to catch up. In the short-term at least, the holy grail was to get Avatar   3D into living rooms as soon as humanly possible. A deal was struck so that copies of Avatar would be shipped with a particular brand of TV. Other TV manufacturers were stuck hawking Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs   and a few made-for-Blu efforts. The thing the TV industry neglected to mention was that you'd only get a couple of 3D glasses with your $3500 tel...

In a week's time, it'll be the first  X-Men  film's 13th birthday. The movie's critical and commercial success gave Hollywood the excuse it needed to revitalise the comic-book-movie 'genre'. X-Men delivered the industry a template of sorts that has largely remained unchanged in the decade that followed. That template required an ensemble cast, mixing up A-list stars with Academy Award winning actors, character veterans, relative newcomers and a few nerd favourites. X-Men also set a visual-effects precedent that eschewed the overblown Batman And Robin ' look' in favour of more modern effects in the vein of  The Matrix . The revised superhero film template also required the X-Men ditch their traditional bright yellow-and-blue tights for... very Matrix -esque black leather costumes. And, just like that, a modern genre was born. Or, rather, re born. The superhero 'genre' had merely been laying dormant. In the decades since Richard Donner...