Many of us here at Slice of SciFi were happy to hear that Warner Brothers decided to abandon its plans to convert the first half of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” to 3-D. And while you might expect that from us based on previous reports and shows, you may not have expected director James Cameron to agree.
Cameron says that studios’ rush to up-convert movies to 3-D is a “mistake.”
“I maintain you can’t do a good conversion of a two-hour movie with high quality in a few weeks like they tried to do with ‘Clash Of The Titans’,” the BBC quotes him as saying.
“I don’t mean to throw that movie under the bus because my buddy Sam [Worthington] is in it, but I think everybody realised that this was a point at which people had gone too far.”
Cameron, speaking at the Blu-Con event in Beverly Hills, added: “You see another stumble with the most recent Harry Potter movie from the same studio making the same mistake – except really getting spanked for it now because they didn’t get the film done.
“They announced it in 3D – threw a bunch of money trying to convert it to 3D in post-production and it simply didn’t work. They just didn’t get it done.”
Cameron stated his belief that post-conversion “should be used for one thing and one thing only – which is to take library titles that are favourites that are proven, and convert them into 3D – whether it’s “Jaws” or “ET” or “Indiana Jones”, “Close Encounters” or one of his previous works like “Titanic” or “Terminator 2.”
So it’s ok to convert “proven” movies though some crappy conversion process but you should never do it to a movie that has not yet been released. Incredible.
James Cameron,
Shut the F@@@ Up. My god Avatar has really gone to his freaking head hasn’t it.
Your right Cameron a mistake has been made. Your conception.
I don’t know where Jimmy thinks he gets off, but he’s pretty much an idiot. Not to mention a thief. And that’s a proven fact, in court. Tsk tsk.
Yes, Cameron is full of himself; however, he said something that made sense.
“I maintain you can’t do a good conversion of a two-hour movie with high quality in a few weeks like they tried to do with ‘Clash Of The Titans’,”
So if Cameron is saying a movie can be successfully up-converted to 3D if the necessary time is taken to do a good job, then he may have a valid point. (Not that I think this is a good or desirable thing to do.)
And yes, I know his real agenda is to see “classic” action movies up-converted to 3D so the general audience will start to accept 3D as the way movies ought to be made. I believe Cameron is feeling the backlash against 3D and seeing his dreams of being the movie maker who made 3D work, slipping through his fingers. Also, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind squeezing some more money out of us for the 3D version of Titanic and anything else he owns an interest in.
Yeah, I think it’s easy to be annoyed with him as a person but I’m not sure you can take him to task for what he actually says. Because he also said, at the same time,
“Once we get to auto-stereoscopic, that’s watching 3-D without glasses, it is going to be the way we watch all of our media. That’s probably eight to 10 years away.”,
which kind of makes sense.
Not to nit-pick but, Cameron didn’t “Blast” Potter did he? He just criticized the studio.