Whenever a new 3D movie comes out, we here at Cinema Blend run what we call To 3D Or Not To 3D reviews. In the feature we break down the components of what makes a movie an enjoyable 3D experience and judge whether or not a ticket for said movie is worth seeing with a $4 surcharge. And one of the main reasons we started writing them was because of Louis Leterrier's Clash of the Titans - which also happened to be our first review.
The Greek epic remake came out in 2010 shortly after the explosive release of James Cameron's Avatar, a film that brought the popularity of 3D to new heights. Wanting to capitalize on the popularity of the format, Warner Bros. made an executive decision to post-convert Clash of the Titans. The mistake they made, however, was that they decided to push back the film's release date by only one week, giving the people working on the film only a couple months to go through the entire film and change it to a different format. The result was horrible, with both critics and audiences complaining about how dark and muddy the movie looked. From a business perspective it was seen as a serious setback for 3D. The 3D conversion was so bad that even the movie's director has publicly admitted to hating it.
Filmmaker Louis Leterrier, whose new film Now You See Me arrives in theaters on Friday, recently sat down for an interview with The Hollywood Reporter and slammed the treatment that Clash of the Titans received from the studio as well as the final product. Said the director, "It was famously rushed and famously horrible. It was absolutely horrible, the 3D. Nothing was working, it was just a gimmick to steal money from the audience. I'm a good boy and I rolled with the punches and everything, but it's not my movie." Explaining that he still has a good relationship with Warner Bros., he says that at one point they simply forced the 3D on him. He added, "I couldn't control it. I said, 'Don't do it.'"
And yet the movie still made more than enough money to get a sequel - which actually did have much better 3D, but much less success at the global box office. What a strange industry.
