‘Avatar’ Makers ‘Monitoring and Evaluating’ 3D Home Market—Landau

"We are continually monitoring and evaluating” the 3D home entertainment market, Avatar producer Jon Landau told Consumer Electronics Daily Thursday when we asked if the movie’s makers had ruled out including 3D in the “ultimate edition” that Fox plans to release in November. The initial Blu-ray that the studio will release April 22 won’t offer 3D, one of the most highly touted features of the movie in its theatrical release.

It’s “too premature” to release the Avatar Blu-ray in 3D now because there just isn’t a large enough installed base for 3D in the home yet, Landau told us at a briefing with reporters in New York, where he also demonstrated select scenes from the Blu-ray and later screened the entire disc. He said he went through a similar issue when releasing Titanic, like Avatar directed by James Cameron, on home video. “We didn’t wait” before releasing Titanic on DVD, and that was a mistake because you can only go to market once with a product, and we came out and there wasn’t enough of an installed base for the DVD,” he said. The VHS version did “astronomically well,” though, he said. It would have been better “to wait” and see how consumers were using DVD, “and that’s what we're going to do” with Avatar in 3D, he said.

There is no specific home 3D installed base figure that Avatar’s makers have in mind before it will consider releasing it with that technology for the home, Landau said. More important is “us being able to work with the medium enough, which we're doing now, and seeing how it looks on [TV] screens and what’s playing and what works,” he said.

Landau indicated he didn’t believe that the need to wear special glasses to watch 3D content would be a major obstacle for growing the technology’s installed base in the home. “I don’t think glasses are an issue when you go to the beach,” he said. But “what I would challenge people to do is” figure out how to “make glasses that can be prescription glasses … so that they can function as your television glasses,” or “how do we make glasses” that can be plugged into a computer’s USB port to get added content. “How do we make glasses that are things you want -- make them cool and hip instead of what we have now?” This “might take some time, but I think that’s the better way to approach it,” he said. Landau predicted that “for the communal experience, you're not going to get rid of glasses for a long time.” Autostereoscopic 3D that doesn’t require special glasses might be available for computers “in the near term, and maybe even the home,” but he said there will still be “limited viewing areas where you can watch” content in 3D because of the small number of “sweet spots” possible with such technology, he said.

Landau also said 3D was not the “technological breakthrough” of Avatar, but rather “the performance capture” was. At least some viewers even prefer seeing Avatar in 2D to 3D, he said, telling reporters that when making a movie in 3D “we direct the eye where to look so that the 3D is hopefully less straining.” When watching a movie in 2D, on the other hand, “your eye can roam more and you can notice some of the other details on the peripheral that in 3D you don’t have the opportunity to do,” he said. Of converting 2D movies to 3D theatrically, he said there’s a mistaken perception that 3D is “a technical process,” when it’s more of an “artistic process.” To do conversion correctly, “you need six to 18 months to do it right and you need the filmmakers involved in that process,” he said.

Ubisoft’s stereoscopic 3D game based on Avatar met with disappointing sales when it was released late last year. “We would have liked it to have done better,” Landau told us. A main problem was the timing of the game’s release, before the movie’s theatrical release, he said, telling us he heard that about 20,000 copies of the game are still being sold weekly. It would have been preferable to release the game after Christmas -- even now -- in hindsight, he said.

The expanded version of Avatar that will be released on Blu-ray in November is expected to include three or four discs, including “immersive bonus materials,” Fox said. The version coming out April 22 won’t include any bonus material, just the movie. Fox opted to use “the disc’s entire storage space in order to provide the highest quality optimal picture and sound,” it said. “The best quality that people can see this movie in is with the least amount of material on the disc,” Landau said. Only “a small section of the fan base” is even interested in the extras, he said. He said the company wouldn’t have been able to “put together a quality special edition” in such a short time frame. The company is also “being very up-front” with consumers, informing them in advance that the initial release won’t offer any extras and that the version with extras will follow in November, he said.

Avatar is being released on Blu-ray and DVD now, only a few weeks after its theatrical run had come to an end for the most part, because there is significant demand now, Landau said. The home release will also potentially open the movie to new audiences who had not seen the film during its theatrical run, he said. Despite becoming the highest-grossing film in history, it missed at least one segment of the audience because many parents wouldn’t take their kids to see a PG-13 rated movie in theaters, he said. The April 22 release will also allow Fox to promote the movie in conjunction with Earth Day, the 40th anniversary of which falls the same day, he said. Avatar’s makers are “still working out” what will be included on each of the special edition’s discs, he said, telling reporters that one disc could be the movie in the exact same form as the one being released April 22.

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Disney said Friday it will release the movie Alice in Wonderland on Blu-ray and DVD June 1, but made no mention in its announcement about 3D. The studio didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The movie, “Disney’s 4th-biggest film of all time,” will be released as a 3-disc Blu-ray Combo Pack including a Blu-ray disc, a DVD and Digital Copy, as well as single-disc Blu-ray and DVD versions, it said.