We may have underestimated the silly pirate show

Plus thoughts on hype vs buzz and that AVATAR 2 trailer

It’s Monday, May 9th, and here’s where we are…

When I was young, I always got excited when May arrived, and not just because my birthday was on the 26th. Hollywood trained me to think of this as the beginning of the biggest season of movies, and so I’d start counting down the days until the first “official” film of the summer would arrive, sometime between the 1st of the month and Memorial Day weekend.

I think that kind of distinction is mostly useless these days, with Hollywood having claimed every available bit of calendar real estate for blockbuster launches. Sure, summer movies are bigger, but you have giant releases in January, February, and March these days as well. They would love to have a nonstop stream of blockbuster franchises, owning every significant date of the year. May kicked off this year with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and that opening weekend was indeed a carpet bombing for the studio. They opened on over 4000 screens and successfully sucked all of the oxygen out of the room. Well-played, I guess.

There is an inevitability to this stuff that is definitely wearing on me these days. When I hear that Kevin Feige left CinemaCon to go straight to the story retreat where they’re planning the next decade of Marvel projects, part of me thinks their optimism for the planet is cute, if misguided, but part of me is also filled with dread at knowing the next decade will be the same nonstop conversation, with different names shifting in and out of it, but with no substantial change in the conversation itself.

Let’s say that’s true. Let’s say Marvel continues to hold this same kind of market dominance for another decade. That would be unparalleled. I just published another entry in the James Bond Declassified series, and while that franchise has been around in some form on and off since the ‘60s, it’s not like there were three or four Bond films every single year during that time. They have gaps between films, sometimes significant ones, and they had to keep reinventing and rebooting the series to try to maintain some kind of commercial relevance. At a certain point, James Bond became a franchise that exists to hold a mirror up to contemporary commercial filmmaking styles, mapping them onto a familiar character to see what happens as pop culture shifts from decade to decade. Want to know what was popular in a certain year? Look at the next Bond film to come out, because you’ll see plenty of whatever it was. Marvel is omnipresent, and I’m not sure how long that can continue. There’s no precedent for what they’re doing, so any previous model you point at is irrelevant. At this point, anyone who tells you what’s going to happen in terms of audience reactions is guessing. You don’t know. They don’t know. All they can do is keep building the track in front of the train and try to keep it rolling as long as they can, and so far, the audience fatigue everyone keeps warning about does not seem to have manifested.

I’m not sure I understand the people who are irritated by the gap between the first Avatar and the first sequel, which hits theaters in December. I think people just like being angry about James Cameron in general. I’m glad he took whatever time he needed to take before making this movie. The underwater motion capture he’s working on is something that wouldn’t have been possible when he made the first film, so he started working to make it possible. This is how long it took. Okay. Cool. The trailer was released online today…

… but honestly, the experience I had with the film in the theater this weekend was totally different than the experience of watching it online, which, of course, is the point. We saw Doctor Strange at the Drafthouse, and we booked a 3D screening. Before the Avatar 2 trailer, there was a notice to put on your glasses, and sure enough, the moment it started, I was reminded why the first film was such a strange and singular theatrical experience. James Cameron thought about 3D for years before shooting in native 3D, composing each scene and sequence in a way that was designed to not only push the boundaries of the frame but also draw you into the frame in an immersive way. I wouldn’t recommend Strange as a 3D experience because that’s not how the film was designed. I hate post-converted films. All of them. I don’t care how good the post-conversion is. The only 3D I’m interested in seeing is native 3D where the filmmaker used that as a tool the same way he used color and sound and every other paintbrush available to a filmmaker. The only thing James Cameron is more obsessed with than creating new 3D worlds is underwater, so the combination of those two obsessions is enough to have me eager to hand over whatever the ticket price is for the biggest IMAX screen in LA in December.

Allen was one year old when Avatar was released. He never saw the film that way, and honestly didn’t see many films in 3D at all. Toshi did see Avatar in the theater, but he was four years old. That was right around the time he was starting to get interested in movies, and I figured it would be one of those things that he would remember forever.

Nope.

Even though he’s three years older, he only has vague memories of that blast of 3D programming that continued a few years after Avatar made All Of The Money. I think the first time we took him to a theater that had 3D glasses was actually before Avatar, though, for a press screening of The Ant Bully. It was open to families and I took my wife and Toshi with me. We ended up sitting near the back of the IMAX 3D auditorium of The Bridge, a theater that no longer exists. That was a great screen, too. Just before the screening, one of the film’s producers walked in and took the seat directly next to Toshi and my wife. She immediately lost her mind, since that producer was Tom Hanks, but she tried to play it cool. As the lights went down, she put on her big heavy glasses, and I put Toshi’s big heavy glasses on him.

The IMAX 3D countdown logo began, and Toshi made it all the way to number four before he grabbed the glasses with both hands, clawing them off of his face with a very loud, “NO, DADDY!”, and hurled them overhand so that they flew about six rows forward where they hit someone.

My wife’s instant mortification combined with Tom Hank’s involuntary guffaw is burned into my brain. “No 3D today, huh?” he said as my wife gathered Toshi up and vanished in a puff of smoke. I went and apologized to the poor innocent victim who caught Toshi’s 3D shrapnel, then had to sit down to actually review the movie. It took Tom Hanks about five minutes to stop chuckling every time he glanced over at me and the two empty seats.

image courtesy Disney/20th Century Studios

It’s safe to say 3D was not an instant hit for Toshi, but he enjoyed a handful of movies that way. I stopped going because I think the presentation got terrible, everything was done as a post-conversion, and I’m not interested in something that dims the image without adding something in return. I am not particularly clamoring for yet another “rebirth” of 3D filmmaking, but I do think in the right hands, there’s something almost dreamlike about it. There’s a feeling of being drawn into the screen that is hard to quantify, and in just that one teaser trailer, I can feel that same thing. The underwater stuff is gorgeous, and I love how there appears to be an adopted human child growing up with the Nav’i, not just because I’m adopted, but also because that seems like a huge technical challenge that Cameron intentionally set for himself. Both of the boys talked after the screening about how they were really surprised by the trailer and by the 3D. They both immediately said that they want to see the re-release of Avatar in the theater this year in 3D, and that they want to see the sequel that way as well. I’m not offering this up as proof that it will or won’t speak to everyone, but more as perspective. For me, it feels like it just happened, like Avatar wasn’t that long ago, and 3D was so big for so long that anyone watching movies now clearly remembers it. But that’s not true. It’s been long enough for an entire moviegoing generation to come of age who has no memory of it at all. I’m curious how teenage audiences who really don’t have any connection to the first film are going to react to the new one. My kids don’t really have a deep attachment to the first film and they’re hooked, and part of what hooked them was the promise of a theatrical experience that they really have not had before.

Everything old is new again, man.