The Decline of 3D or the Death of Movies

The Hollywood Reporter has done an interview with DreamWorks Animation top dog Jeffrey Katzenberg about the “alarming dip in 3D grosses at the domestic box office this summer.” This dip apparently started with Disney’s current overseas hit: Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. Katzenberg says: “For the first time, a majority of the audience opted to see a studio 3D pic in 2D. It happened again a week later with DreamWorks Animation’s Kung Fu Panda 2.”

To tell you the truth, my fellow readers, this isn’t news to me or to anyone. 3D has been one of the affecting factors to the slow death of the movies. It has been stuffed down our eyes, throats and noses ever since that little movie called Avatar came into our lives. The world was presented with a "new" way of making loads and loads of money. The fact of the matter is that these top Hollywood studio heads are digging and digging and digging for every and any excuse to get money from the consumer. How, you may ask? By stimulating their most obvious senses. Romantic comedies are not even the top grossing movies anymore. All wee see are action movies in 3D. Adventure movies in 3D. Cartoon movies in 3D. Everything is in 3D. That way, putting the consumer in a position where they’re not caring about being exploited in the most, both direct and indirect ways to get a buck out of them (us).

What’s even funnier about this subject is that Pirates was actually a successful film, both domestically and internationally. Only it grossed more money internationally in the 3D aspect than it did domestically in 2D. And it was still successful.

“The audience has spoken, and they have spoken loudly.” That the studios don’t want to listen and keep filling their heads with nonsense about 3D being all the rage now a days, therefore they must juice it until there’s nothing more to juice? Well, that’s something that even a 5 year-old can tell you.

The truth of the matter is that the majority of these studios don’t even listen to what their audience is asking for. Therefore they will continue to blame ‘the end of the movies as we know it’ on 3D. When, in fact, one of the main reasons that the movie industry is in its deathbed is the overuse of 3D.

Image courtesy of: http://jotaperealini.blogspot.com/2010/12/kung-fu-panda-2-el-ano-de-la.html

"Priority Piracy Watch List"

I was reading my weekly The Hollywood Reporter newsletter and I found this article on piracy and the US Congress's support of the industry. As a normal person, who doesn’t have a job one would recur to piracy thinking that it’s no big deal. As an industry professional one can only be disgusted at the fact that people really don’t understand the severity of the act of piracy.

The battle has been constant, from ad campaigns, to conferences that condemn it and now, a group called the Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus (IAPC) has decided to release a “priority piracy watch list”. And on top of that being backed up by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) saying, “it will help raise awareness of creative content that it is stolen and illegally distributed through some of the world’s most notorious marketplaces.”

The fact of the matter is that “Theft of American movies, television shows, and other creative content in these countries and around the world costs tens of billions of dollars and jeopardizes the livelihoods of more than 2.4 million stagehands, makeup artists, actors, costume and set designers, truck drivers, architects, directors, accountants, and others who make up America’s creative community,” Greg Frazier, MPAA’s Executive Vice President an Chief Policy Officer, said in a statement.”

Ever since Napster came on in the late 90s the amount of illegal downloading has become the new way of theft. Striking not only digital creative content, but also, identity theft, credit card fraud, among others.

Frazier continues, “As more and more people watch and enjoy creative works online, America and its partners abroad NEED to increase domestic and international efforts to protect those works from theft.”

Illegal downloading is one of the main reasons why studio heads have gone forward with highly expensive marketing campaigns, ridiculous amounts of product placement, and basically juicing the movies they make with merchandise that sometimes can border on ridiculous.

Now the US Congress comes into play with this initiative to try and create awareness with basically the entire world, so that this digital epidemic comes to a close.

I’m a professional of this industry. I know the hard work that goes into it. I love my job. But people only see the end product, they don’t see the work –hard work, that goes into making a movie, or an album, or a TV show, specially TV that happens weekly. The public has no idea. It’s hard for us, to give so much of ourselves to provide them with a quality end product, for these pirates to steal it.

Let’s hope that this initiative takes momentum and creates conscience among us.