Thursday, July 21, 2011

Katzenberg talks 3D and movies.

I've been keeping busy of late. Between watching LOST and a vacation to Disney World, I've been keeping busy. That's in addition to working on a scifi story that continues to evolve over time.

Anyway, on the subject of movies, Man of Steel, the Christopher Nolan-produced reboot to the Superman franchise, is going to see a June 2013 release as opposed to December 2012. At this point, all I care is that it is done correctly. If you remember, The Avengers was supposed to come out this month but it was pushed back until next year.

Jeffrey Katzenberg spoke recently about the 3D craze and what's happening to it. Here's the transcript. He does have an angle to it that I agree with. It's not being used for the creative storytelling. Rather, it's being used for greed. Hollywood studios want money but with using 3D as a gimmick, films make more money with less viewers. That's in addition to the frequently rising prices of movie tickets.
JEFFREY KATZENBERG: Sure. I mean, well, for sure it came, and for sure the bloom is off the rose for a moment in time, driven by a singular and unique characteristic that only exists in Hollywood, greed. And, you know, so I think there were, unfortunately, a number of people who thought that they could capitalize on what was a great, genuine excitement by movie goers for a new premium experience, and thought they could just deliver a kind of low-end crappy version of it, and people wouldn't care, or wouldn't know the difference. And anything ‑‑ you know, nothing could have been further from the truth.

So, I think that it's a ‑‑ I think Hollywood has managed to grasp defeat from the jaws of victory here. And with time we'll get back there again, but it's only going to come by understanding and embracing this as a creative, storytelling tool, and a way of giving an enhanced movie theater experience, premium experience. So, our great film makers that are using these tools today, Marty Scorsese, Stephen Spielberg, Peter Jackson, more and more of the really, I think, great users of both technology and great storytelling are now starting to get at it, and they will deliver good experiences to people, and I think it will take us a while, but we'll earn it back.
Later on, Katzenberg asked the audience for "a show of hands of people that would say the last seven or eight months of movies is the worst lineup of movies you've experienced in the last five years of your life."

It's no lie. We have movies being labeled as Hollywood blockbusters because people go see them. However, you look at something like Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Paramount is using excerpts to praise the film when it is not just critically panned but even the audience members wished they never wasted money on it. I'm not gonna complain about the action aspects of it--because the special effects were good--but the story as a whole was one big crock of shit.

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