| abstract | - 3D movies first became a fad for a few short years in the 1950s; they were expensive to show and required special equipment that was often not used correctly. A second 3D movie fad began in the early 1980s with the low budget Western Comin' At Ya!; this was when film franchises started releasing their third movies in 3D, and television station would even occasionally show 1950s 3D movies using red/blue glasses. After trickling out around 1984 or so, 3D movies came around again in the 2000s, creating the third 3D movie fad. Advances in computer technology made it much easier to create 3D movies in general, and especially in computer animation. This is also after IMAX had spread. People have noted modern 3D has worked best with animation with animated feature films being the most highly praised 3D productions to date such as How to Train Your Dragon (98% on Rotten Tomatoes) and Toy Story 3 (99%). However, the increased costs to produce 3D movies, coupled with the recent decline in attendence of 3D movies, has caused some speculators to express concern over the longevity of the format. The failure to get 3D television sets into homes also does not bode well for the format. 3D Movies have their own variation of Shoot the Money where things will jut out towards the audience a lot more frequently than would occur in a 2D movie. Thanks to the proliferation of 3D movies, studios naturally have jumped at the chance to get more money out of their audiences by converting movies into 3D which were shot "flat" (with only one camera). However, this often turns out imperfectly, due to having to squeeze a lot of intricate post-production work (imagine having to cut out a piece of an image in Photoshop, then adjust it to move twenty-four times a second--now imagine doing it for multiple layers of an image, for the entire length of a feature film) into the short period before a fast approaching release date. Critics such as Roger Ebert, already pretty biased against 3D, are even more venomous towards fake 3D. It has been noted by several of these critics that, like the other big periods of 3D movies in the 1950s and 1980s, the recent boom of 3D releases comes when Hollywood's profit margins are significantly under threat by an outside force (television in the first case, home recording and VHS in the second, downloading and DVD today) with the consequence that studios are desperately looking for any old gimmick that will get people into movie seats. There has also been some recent concern about 3D movies wreaking havoc with the focus and convergence of people's vision. Another issue has been a few theaters being too lazy to change out the 3D lens of their projectors when they put on a 2D movie instead, leaving those patrons stuck with a very dim image on the screen to watch. See Three Dimensional Episode for non-3D series with episodes in 3D. (Which can overlap with 3D movies if it's a series of movies.) Examples:
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