ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
While we're on the subject of 3-D, we wondered how eagerly Americans are rushing into the third dimension in movie theaters and on television. So we've called up David Cohen, who is an editor at Variety where he covers 3-D, and he joins us now from NPR West in Culver City, California. Welcome to the program.
Mr. DAVID COHEN (Editor, Variety): Hi Robert, first-time guest, long-time listener.
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SIEGEL: And around this time last year, "Avatar" was on its way to record-breaking box-office receipts because a lot of people were going to see it and because they were willing to pay more to see it on 3-D. So we were starting to hear the obits for 2-D. A year later, what's the score?
Mr. COHEN: I would say that what you're seeing this year is 3-D having some growing pains but continuing to grow. When we look at 2010, most of the run of "Avatar" was in 2010. So there's a vast clump of box office in 3-D at the beginning of the year, and then that was followed up by "Alice in Wonderland," which was also a monster hit, fueled in great measure by 3-D.
What you then began to get into, though, was efforts of the studios to sort of exploit the format, because with 3-D they finally found something that they can charge extra for. So the incentive is to just get something that's 3-D out into theaters and charge extra for it, whether it's really good or not.
And so you had some inferior 3-D titles, that is to say where the 3-D wasn't very good, which is a separate question from whether the movies are good, and I'd say that's where the format began to run into some pushback.
SIEGEL: Well, is a 3-D movie something now that kids are coming to expect as part of the experience of going to the movies?
Mr. COHEN: Well, certainly if you look at the number of animated films and the percentage of animated films that are coming out in 3-D, I think we are educating a whole generation of young moviegoers that 3-D is what movies are supposed to look like. And those young moviegoers, as they mature, will not have any problem putting on glasses to watch a movie and will just take it for granted that that's how you watch a film is with - in 3-D.
SIEGEL: Now on to 3-D television sets. I've read that so far, sales were disappointing this past year.
Mr. COHEN: Well, remember that 3-D television sets are so far very much a niche product. They're at the upper end of the product range for everybody who makes them, and there's not a lot of content.
But what I'm also hearing is that within the content creators, the studios, the networks and the consumer electronics companies, the video distributors, there's an unprecedented joint effort to avoid the chicken-and-egg problem that has plagued things like color and HD in rollouts in the past, so that everybody's working together so that when you go to the store and buy a 3-D unit, you can have something to watch when you get home.
But at the moment, it's really not a mass product. On the other hand, no one expected it to be, really. I think that you're in a 10-year rollout, and you're in about year two now, maybe.
SIEGEL: Well, looking ahead, David, do people who keep track of 3-D figure that it is coming at us slowly but inevitably or that it's maybe a boom that's fizzled out a bit or that we can't tell yet?
Mr. COHEN: You know, it's a funny thing with 3-D. I've been in the Variety archives, which go back to 1905, looking at the early coverage of stereoscopic cinema, going back to the first 20 years of the 20th century. And at that time, everybody assumed it was coming any day now. And in fact, in the 1920s, people were skeptical about sound the way people are now skeptical about 3-D because it had been tried, and it had always failed.
Well, as soon as it was successful, that skepticism vanished, and we don't even remember it. I think with 3-D, we're at a similar phase. It had been tried a lot of times, it's always failed, and there's still a lot of skepticism around it.
But I think what you're going to see is a transition to 3-D similar to what happened with color, where the TV networks went all color. So what you have is this sort of symbiosis. You have TV going 3-D; you have movies going 3-D. As long as they're both going 3-D, that will continue.
If 3-D television fails, either because consumers lose interest or it proves to be dangerous for your health or for whatever reason, then you might see this 3-D boom fizzle out. Otherwise, I think it's not just a boom. I think it's a wave that's going to eventually become how movies are made. It will just become another tool for moviemakers.
SIEGEL: Well, David Cohen of Variety, thanks for talking with us here in 1-D.
Mr. COHEN: Thank you very much.
SIEGEL: That's David Cohen, who follows 3-D issues for Variety, where he's an editor.