I feel dirty now.

Haha. I admit, if it WAS $200, you’d have a fair point!

Yes it is better, but we are basically watching a subset of the large screen no matter how you look at it.

Yes, it does. IMAX takings having been steadily rising for the past 5-10 years. The IMAX takings alone for Avatar were at least $200 by the end of February. You can deny it all you want, but IMAX isn’t a fad anymore. It’s a screen people are spending money to watch. And it’s not just Avatar – look at the takings of films in general and IMAX is accounting for more and more of the percentage every month we go on.

“Sometimes people will see things out of curiosity or because the tickets were sold out for the other showing.”

Whatever the reasons are, it’s happening. We can fight it like the slapsticks did 100 years ago and end up with our whole genre of films accumulating dust in a vault of old-time movies..or we can move onto new ways of writing film like the successful wordsmiths did.

“It’s possible that technology that makes a large percentage of the audience queazy and forces focus on a small subset of the screen is not going to be as huge a thing as you (and Hollywood) are predicting.”

This is exactly the thing which Avatar avoided, which is why it is the ground-breaking film along the same lines as the first films in colour and that had sound.

This WASN’T a film that concentrated on a specific area of the screen to gimmickise it. This was a film that used 3D to capture a whole world, a world whose background was as interesting as the foreground (moreso, if you take into account that the acting was happening in the foreground :-p). It was essentially only used for cinematography rather than just explosions. Even the quiet scenes had the same level of technology applied as the battle sequences, which for any film is a groundbreaking turnaround, even for 2D.

So before you dismiss it, let’s word it another way: 3D has given the chance for quiet, non-action films the chance to appear on bigger screens instead of arthouse cinemas. It’s up to if those writers (people like UNK) embrace 3D. If not, they’re digging their own grave, as these films won’t be written and we’ll be left with more shoddily plotted 3D action films.

It’s the same reason we don’t have slapstick so much anymore – when we got talkies, the slapsticks didn’t even try to adapt, while the wordsmiths crafted delicious dialogue. Now slapstick is a joke in itself.

In 50 years, however much we liked well-crafted stories, it’s only as much as people liked slapstick 100 years ago. Let’s live and learn and adapt, instead of shunning things we are angry at and scared of.

I think you misunderstand a screenwriters role. Screenwriters simply aren’t going to write 3d elements into a screenplay. The world is in 3d and the screenwriter already describes that. How does one write a scene where the trees are more three dimensional than the way one would have written the same scene a decade ago? It is the Director and/or Cinematographer who now have additional challenges to make that tree appear more 3d than they could have before, and the audiences job to care.

Personally I found District 9 more realistic. I’m not talking story or plot or anything but the use of pseudo documentary style (something that could be written into a screenplay) seemed more realistic than the 3d of Avatar. That’s of course because we are inundated with watching that style day in and day out on tv while 3d has to compete with what we see all the time, not just when we’re expected to be entertained and with glasses and other restrictions I don’t think the 3d future is a given.