Earlier in the week we reported George Lucas’s plans to re-release his little known franchise: Star Wars in 3D, now suddenly James Cameron’s Titanic has a re-release date in 3D, and its within weeks of Lucas’s Star Wars 3D.
April 15th 2012 marks the 100th anniversary of the ships sinking and Paramount mark its own centennial the same month and its possible Titanic's release can be brought forward to the lucrative Valentines Day weekend. The 3D conversion scenes for Titanic are expected to cost between 10-15 million dollars.
“It’s a time-consuming process, and we want to do it
right,” Titanic Producer Jon Landau told The Hollywood Reporter. “Converting
a movie is not a technical process; it’s a creative process that has technology
behind it. There were eight or nine companies used on the test, so we could
compare. So far, there’s only a group that went to the head of the class.”
What is interesting is that previous to this Cameron has been opposed to creating 3D in Post and shooting in traditional 2D. Last month, Cameron told Vanity Fair that Piranha 3D was “an example of what we should not be doing in 3-D.”
He continued: “It just cheapens the medium and reminds you of the bad 3-D
horror films from the 70s and 80s, like Friday the 13th 3-D.
When movies got to the bottom of the barrel of their creativity and at the last
gasp of their financial lifespan, they did a 3-D version to get the last few
drops of blood out of the turnip.”
Phantom Menace and Titanic are likely to get
distribution in as many 3D locations as can be secured, likely somewhere in the
range of 2,000-2,500 theaters. That’s as many as are available for tentpole
releases today and shouldn’t be tough to secure in two years because exhibitors
are adding 3D screens as quickly as possible to grow the installed base.
