Blue skies for 3D
With the arrival of James Cameron’s Avatar and an increasing number of international releases, 3D is impossible to ignore. Miguel Gonzalez found that Australia is getting ready to embrace it with stereoscopic arms.
The global 3D market is reaching a stage of maturity, with the release of A Christmas Carol (November), Avatar (December) and Alice in Wonderland (March 2010), according to the president of the Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures Group, Mark Zoradi.
“We’re at that tipping point where 3D is coming out of the animated world, and these three movies will take us to a moment somewhere in 2010, no later than 2011, when there will be a big 3D-only release, at least in the US. We’ll then start seeing that happen in international territories too.”
Australia might not be as close to a 3D-only release as the US, but Disney’s local figures indicate that we’re not very far either. On January 1, 2009, Bolt was released on 3D at 33 locations, or 32 percent of the film’s total screens. During the September school holidays, Up opened on 100 3D screens with it a 47 percent stereo release. By November, 65 percent of A Christmas Carol’s opening week screens were 3D, an impressive 33 percent up from Bolt’s 3D split only 10 months earlier.
