‘Avatar’ Already Mastered For Blu-ray 3D, Director Cameron Says

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. -- Fox has “already mastered” Avatar for release on Blu-ray 3D “and it looks fantastic,” director James Cameron said at the Digital Entertainment Group’s Blu-Con 2010 conference Tuesday. Producer Jon Landau said Blu-ray will give audiences “the highest-quality 3D” experience available when Avatar is released in 3D on the format. But neither film maker tipped his hand on when Avatar might be released on Blu-ray 3D.

Cameron bristled at an audience member who asked whether 3D was little more than Hollywood’s “flavor of the month” and would die just as it did in the early 1950s. “I think we're way past that,” and “it’s a waste of time to answer a question like that,” Cameron said. 3D is “not a flirtation” but “a renaissance that will continue indefinitely,” fueled not by movies but by the “conversion to live broadcasts” of sports, music and comedy, he said. The launch of HDTV “wasn’t a flirtation,” Cameron said. It’s now “pretty ubiquitous, and 3D will be the same."

The limitation on the amount of 3D content that can be created is “we don’t have enough cameras” to do live 3D productions, Cameron said. And there aren’t “enough people who know how to use them,” he said. Once those shortages are resolved, 3D will take off “in a really resounding way,” Cameron said: “I haven’t seen anything that didn’t benefit from 3D.” He cited Masters Golf coverage as an example of live 3D production that will woo mass audiences: “And I hate golf."

Clash of the Titans and the recent Harry Potter movie are avid examples of how “you can’t do” 3D conversions on the fly, Cameron said when asked about the market impact of bad 3D. He said he regrets throwing both those films “under the bus.” In those cases, and in others, studios need to learn that 3D can’t be “slapped down as a layer after the fact,” he said. “If you want to do 3D right, you have two choices -- shoot the movie in 3D or do a conversion” that’s indistinguishable from one shot in 3D, he said.

Studios are “rising to the occasion” in response to “premature” criticism that the dearth of Blu-ray 3D content for retail sale is hurting adoption, said Kris Brown, Warner Home Video vice president of worldwide high-def market expansion. The major studios have decided to make Nov. 16 a red-letter day for Blu-ray 3D, said Brown, who chairs the DEG’s 3D working group. On that date, studios will release 36 Blu-ray 3D titles, 24 of which will be available for retail sale, the rest to be bundled under proprietary promotional agreements with individual CE makers, Brown said. It’s bundles like that which critics say have been crimping Blu-ray 3D software’s availability at retail.

The seven Blu-ray 3D titles that Warner Home Video will release this year, beginning with six releases Nov. 16, will make it the most aggressive studio on that front, Brown said. “Let’s be clear, bundling is a good thing,” he said. “The issue is, there’s less content on Blu-ray than there was on DVD.” He urged CE makers and studios not to be too restrictive in their bundling deals. That the same two or three Blu-ray 3D titles play as a loop on retail endcaps will only perpetuate the perception that not enough content is available, Brown said.

Avatar “broke down the wall” by boosting Blu-ray adoption, Fox Home Entertainment President Mike Dunn said on a panel with other studio home entertainment chiefs. The industry’s Blu-ray shipments for the year are up about 86 percent but have not been big enough to offset the decline in the DVD business, Dunn said. That’s likely to change soon, he said. As a result of the Blu-ray player sales growth that Avatar helped spawn, Blu-ray “is becoming mainstream now,” Dunn said. Blu-ray is “one of the fastest-growing consumer electronics goods there is,” he said.

Blu-ray “is a product that customers love,” Bill Carr, Amazon vice president of music and video, said in a retail keynote. “This kind of customer love will take us a long way.” But “broad selection is needed to signal that Blu-ray is here to stay,” he said. In breadth of titles, Blu-ray is lagging significantly behind DVD, he said, noting that the 25,000 DVD titles released in the format’s first five years compared with just under 5,000 Blu-ray titles after five years. “It will be a great day” when Blu-ray’s title count reaches parity with DVD’s, he said.

At Amazon, in the first three quarters after customers buy their first Blu-ray disc, their “total video spend” on Blu-ray and DVD grows fourfold compared with the three quarters preceding that first purchase, he said. The bad news is that half the dollars they spend are for DVDs, suggesting customers want to buy title on Blu-rays but opt for the DVD versions because Blu-ray isn’t available, he said. Besides boosting Blu-ray title breadth, reducing the price gap between DVD and Blu-ray “will drive Blu-ray adoption and growth,” Carr said. Amazon data shows that when there’s a $5 price premium on a Blu-ray title that’s also available on DVD, 75 percent of the unit sales will be on Blu-ray,” he said. When there’s no price premium, Blu-ray’s share of the unit sales grows to 90 percent, he said.