There’s a lot riding on Avatar: The Way of Water. It may sound ridiculous to suggest that a sequel to the highest-grossing film ever made could possibly be a gamble – but it is. Thirteen years have passed since Avatar first hit screens. The cinematic landscape has been stripped bare in the interim by declining audiences, bullish competition from streaming services, and ever-dwindling investment in original ideas. James Cameron has kept the budget for The Way of Water under wraps, though has conceded that it was “very f***ing expensive”: according to the veteran filmmaker, The Way of Water needs to become the “third or fourth” highest-grossing film ever made just to break even. Beneath this game of precarious balance sheets and capitalist folly, however, there could be something else at stake: the future of 3D.
It’s almost impossible to talk about 3D films without mentioning Avatar; it is the Citizen Kane of films that require goofy lenses to appreciate. But it was far from the first attempt to harness 3D’s real potential. In fact, filmmakers had experimented with 3D projections since the earliest days of cinema, building up to a brief boom in the 1950s. (The fad was widely considered to have peaked with Alfred Hitchcock’s masterful 1954 thriller Dial M for Murder.) There were drawbacks, though – namely the expense (prints required twice as much film and, often, two projectionists) and the common incidences of motion sickness. By the 1980s, the kinks had started to be ironed out, and, with the rise of Imax screens, a resurgence beckoned. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the popularity of 3D films snowballed. There were a lot of kids’ movies and genre fare – Journey to the Centre of the Earth; Superman Returns – and before long, beloved modern (and not-so-modern) classics (Star Wars; Titanic; The Lion King) were being given the ol’ third-dimension spit-shine.
