Avatar is coming to DVD soon — April 22, the 40th anniversary of Earth Day — but it won’t be in the eye-popping 3-D that captivated audiences in many theaters worldwide.
Alice in Wonderland, too, is coming to living rooms by summertime, barely three months after its initial theatrical debut.
This is a worrisome trend for movie theater owners, who are afraid that the rush to DVD will undercut the exclusivity they have to offer audiences.
And with 3-D televisions finally rolling out onto the market, the gimmicks they have started to rely on to ensure steady streams of customers may not count for much for much longer.
In the case of Avatar, James Cameron’s 3-D sci-fi environmental epic, this first April 22 home release will be a very stripped-down experience. There’s no 3-D, for one thing — the technology just hasn’t caught up — and there are no special features at all, a compromise to ensure the picture and sound quality of the special effects-heavy film is the absolute best it can be without its natural 3-D habitat.
Theater owners were already miffed when they had to obey long-standing contractual obligations and replace the sensational Avatar on many 3-D screens with Disney’s Alice. It hasn’t hurt them, probably, but it sure seemed to rankle at the time.
But as the 3-D experience begins penetrating more and more homes, movie house impresarios are going to be faced with the fact that their thunder’s been stolen, and they’ll be forced to come up with new reasons for people to spend their scarce disposable income on the entertainment they offer. (Smell-O-Vision, anyone?)
There is an upside for the movie industry as a whole, at least a temporary one: As 3-D TVs proliferate and 3-D movies come home, it will take a while for practitioners of movie piracy to catch up with the latest technology. They’ll inevitably get there, but there will be a learning curve.
