Ever since Jame’s Cameron’s Avatar hit movie the­aters last year peo­ple have been oohing and ahhing at the tech­nol­ogy that was employed to make the very-true-to-life planet of Pan­dora seem real. His use of 3-D tech­nol­ogy and the abil­ity to cre­ate pho­to­re­al­is­tic computer-generated char­ac­ters out of pix­els was cool and ahead of its time and cost a whole lot of money to make…and it shows. The film *looks* great and it’s enjoy­able and all, but I’m glad it didn’t win the Best Pic­ture Oscar. That would have been like giv­ing Star Wars the Best Pic­ture for hav­ing really awe­some spe­cial effects.

And every­one said that Avatar would be a game changer, the meme was com­ing down the pipe even before the movie was released and the whole under­stand­ing of why it would be the game-changer-to-be was because of the pho­to­re­al­is­tic char­ac­ters. But for some rea­son that whole angle of the film has been lost in the cloud that it was in 3-D.

Glo­ri­ous 3-D! Plants and ani­mals and those Huey heli­copter look­ing VTOLs and float­ing moun­tains and all. All of it in 3-D. And like I said ear­lier, the film looks great.

So now other stu­dios have latched onto that break­ing new tech­nol­ogy from the 1950’s also and films all over the place are about to be released in 3-D, whether you want them to be or not. Clash of the Titans was filmed in stan­dard 2-D, but after Avatar splashed big Warner Bros. went back and made Titans into 3-D to sat­isfy this unquench­able desire for Perseus and the Kraken and Medusa’s head to be in 3-D. The remake of Piranha is going to be in 3-D and even more films are com­ing out in that cut­ting edge 20th Cen­tury technology.

But butts in the seats in the­aters have been declin­ing for the past sev­eral years since HD has been intro­duced into the home the­ater mar­ket. The big stu­dios have been ask­ing them­selves what could bring peo­ple back to the the­ater and they think they’ve found it, for now.

Going back to the game changer — I don’t see why the stu­dios haven’t fig­ured out yet why Avatar is really such a big deal, because it’s fairly obvi­ous. Maybe it’s because of legal issues that would be involved in the mak­ing of film, but the log­i­cal end to what Avatar has brought us is film­mak­ers being able to have any actor or actress, liv­ing or dead, in their film. George C. Scott as Robert E. Lee in a Rid­ley Scott pic­ture? Done. Jimmy Stew­art and Jim Car­rey finally together in a com­edy after all this time? Doable. Grace Kelly back to play Julia Roberts’ mother? Not impos­si­ble. All it takes is a bunch of LEDs on a stand-in actor’s head and we can paint Char­lie Chap­lin in a new com­edy from the Far­relly broth­ers. He could eat poop or some­thing and then do a funny dance.

Voice tal­ent could be big then and actors that never got work before could (secretly) put block­busters on their resumes. Like I said, legal issues abound, since the fam­i­lies of these peo­ple might dis­agree with allow­ing their loved ones to return from the grave to be res­ur­rected again on the big screen, but every­one in Hol­ly­wood has a price, right?

So 3-D? It’s a fad again. Hol­ly­wood should look to the real future — har­vest­ing dead actors for profit.