March of the Gimmicks: Cineworld introducing wobbly seats

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Today, the day after I wrote of 3D cinema’s recent decline in popularity, I have discovered that Cineworld are installing D-BOX seats in a Glasgow screen for the release of Disney’s upcoming sci-fi action flick John Carter. Confused? In other words, your average cinema trip is being turned into riding on Star Tours. It’s a Disneyland experience for a Disneyland price tag, invading your multiplex with the subtlety of your average Main Street USA Parade.

Already doing the rounds in the US since 2009 D-BOX chairs are produced by a Canadian firm of the same name. The chairs resemble your average cinema seat, but are controlled by a relay box which issues commands in sync with the film playing. Combine that with a pair of 3D glasses and you have one expensive way of missing a large part of the film or chucking up.

The good news is that once you’ve paid the excess for your D-BOX seat, you can turn the effect off with a dial on the seat, for when it all gets too much or too irritating. It gives you something to play with too, when your mandatorily 3D film turns out to be really terrible.

Cineworld insists that D-BOX creates a “multi-sensorial revolution in film watching” and an “unmatched realistic immersive experience”. Nothing, truly, is more immersive than trying to watch a film whilst being jerked around in your seat and wearing dark-tinted, thick-rimmed glasses. Doesn’t that sound much better than being able to focus on a motion picture without anything in the way?

I can’t even imagine this technology will do much to immerse you in what’s going on, much in the same way that 3D didn’t either. As I discovered back in the days of Cars 2, the barrier of glasses and the darker, poorer picture actually created a barrier between the film and I - and D-BOX seats will no doubt make that barrier ever more obtrusive. 

Cameras can do wonderful things to create a sense of depth on a 2D plane with light and shadow, focus and blur, and all without some funny spectacles; they can also create a sense of motion without the help of some wiggly cinema chairs. I also can’t help but feel sorry for the audience members who have chosen regular seats, who will be subjected to two hours of the rows in front wobbling back and forth whenever the action heats up.

The problem with the modern film industry is that it keeps seeking new gimmicks to keep audiences coming back, even though they’re not going anywhere. 2011 saw around 171.5 million cinema admissions, while 2010 saw 37 million less than that. What’s the need for gadgetry like this?

The answer lies in 3D: or, rather, it’s probable decline. 3D isn’t pulling in audiences like it did when Avatar hit the big screen, so pulling out the stops with a new expensive gimmick will, for distributors and cinema firms, increase the cash flow, at least for a little while. As for 3D? It’s very much on its way out with your average moviegoer, as my unscientific Facebook poll conducted this morning will testify.

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However, much like 3D, audiences will tire of D-BOX. Maintaining the seats will become too expensive as people grow tired of wobbling around, and they will probably be discarded. D-BOX’s ever declining share price on the Toronto Stock Exchange shows interest in the firm and the tech is rapidly going south. Cineworld is essentially installing an already-defunct technology in its otherwise perfectly functional cinemas.

I know I can’t stop the onslaught of D-BOX for now, but I beg of you: when John Carter hits your local multiplex next month, make a statement by leaving your 3D glasses, and your sick bag, at home. Come for the movie, stay for the movie - not for cinema’s next big trick at seperating you from what’s happening on the screen.

Sources: Cineworld, Film Distributors Association, Google Finance

Still here? Have a gander at my film reviews.

3D in 2012: A dying husk soon to vanish

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Bad news, blog-reading friends: 3D in your local cinema is still very much alive. It’s writhing on the floor, bleeding a little, but it’s still going, existing, getting in the way of your film with some dull-tinted polarising lenses and hipster-thick frames. It’s still upping your ticket price, rummaging in your wallet for your spare change and making off with it in exchange for some tacky out-the-screen tricks. 3D is a monstrous little shit, but Lou and I have been lucky to escape from the curse quite recently, accidentally opting to watch the 2D version of Cars 2 and feeling all the better for it.

Even then, 3D still thrives in the deepest underbellies of the movie world - and do you know why? It’s simple: because most of the films released in 3D as of 2012 are terrible.

2011 was, as some have put it, the year 3D reached saturation. Despite high-profile releases such as Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Transformers 3 and the final Harry Potter releasing in both 3D and pleasantly 2D formats, the figures just didn’t add up when it comes to 3D raking in the profits. Be warned: this is where ballpark figures come into play. Suppose, for the sake of ease, that we use Cineworld’s usual ticket prices of £7.30 for an adult and £9.40 (the regular adult fee, plus a £2.10 3D surcharge) for our ticket prices.

Despite Transformers raking in 60% of its opening weekend gross from 3D in the USA, the ~25% hike in price for the privilege of viewing in 3D brings the actual audience figures down to an amount not much greater than those who opted for 2D. The story is worse for Pirates’ case: just 46% of the gross came from 3D showings in the US, but the actual audience figures are, ballpark, somewhere in the realm of 35% of the total opening weekend.

Across the entirety of 2011, 3D accounted for $1.7 billion of the US’ film industry’s box office figures, 16.7% of the total gross revenue from last year. Compare that to 2010 - the year of Toy Story 3 and a large chunk of Avatar’s viewing figures - which saw 3D films bring in $2 billion for the US box office. Now line those figures up with the number of 3D releases each year: 2011 saw 38 films released, whilst 2010 hosted just 24.

In 2012, 3D releases are gently shuffling to the sidelines, to the point of obscurity. 3D is primarily being saved for re-releases of past films converted for the big screen in the name of fleecing the average moviegoer: Titanic, Beauty and the Beast, Star Wars Episode I, and Finding Nemo later in the year. Outside of the realm of re-releases, the only films which spring to mind are just terrible.

Three of note spring to mind: Underworld: Awakening 3D (39/100 on Metacritic), Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (31) and The Darkest Hour (16). In the UK, these films were released primarily or exclusively in 3D in theaters, meaning the only choice for masochistic filmgoers keen on harming themselves to the tune of these movies was to splash out on a surcharged ticket, plunging them into misery augmented with further depression after leaving the theater - probably halfway through the film itself.

Naturally, 3D will continue to show up for 2012’s biggest new films - The Avengers, Men In Black III, Ice Age 4, The Hobbit - but I predict that this year will be the year the 3D bubble well and truly bursts. Its time is almost up, already relegated as it is to the domain of wallet-fleecing and crappy gimmick films, and I for one will not be sorry to see it go. Just let us watch films for what they are.

Sources: MovieInsider.com, BoxOfficeMojo.com, Entertainment Weekly

2011: A Year In Blogs Pt.1 - Games, Game Jams and Greatness

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It’s with a degree of surprise that the end of 2011 rolls around, from humble beginnings as a newly-redundant retail worker to a published author, international traveller and generally better person in the space of 12 relatively short and speedy months. For a large chunk of that time, this blog has been along for the ride, along with my writing and podcasts for gaming sites.

For the sake of record-keeping and misty-eyed retrospecting, I’ve taken half an hour out of the last day of 2011 to collect the best of it.

January saw me agree to write a book about the Global Game Jam, an international 48-hour game development marathon for programmers, designers and artists alike. Having popped in to previous Game Jams out of nothing more than gutsy curiosity, the prospect of staying at one for a weekend and turning a book out of it was, to say the least, terrifying. Nevertheless, the first 20,000 words were birthed during the Jam itself and the rest of the book, along with its collected doodles and interviews, would be carved out in the rest of the year.

Feburary heralded the end of being a teenager, my lovely girlfriend Louisa and, aside from going to see The Midnight Beast for some reason, didn’t feature much else, aside from the excellent, excellent Dead Space 2 and some ponderous thinking regarding PlayStation hacker George Hotz and why he was such a knob. Games reviewed this month included Media Molecule’s amazing LittleBigPlanet 2.

March came and went, with university and Fallout: New Vegas expansion Dead Money passing the time, but as of April things turned interesting, what with Kapow! Comic Con and a Gymkhana-tastic DiRT 3 preview event to pop along to down in London. Not long afterwords, I found myself back in the safe hands of a retail job, meaning 2011 wouldn’t be a year regulated to the dole queue, which is always a comforting thought - something Sony was lacking in following the collapse of the PlayStation Network, for which they gathered little sympathy.

May saw the launch of this blog, which I opened with witterings about the Alternative Vote and superinjunctions - fields which I didn’t really have the full collection of facts on but, hey, I’ve got a blog, I’ll write on it if I damn well want to. I dabbled in film reviews for the first time this month too, writing up Insidious (pretty great) and Pirates of the Carribbean: On Stranger Tides (not pretty great).

In June, university took its toll on writing for a while, the only piece on here being an instructive statement to publishers on how to save regular books - by mishmashing them with eBooks in what I touted as “eBooks 2.0”. Needless to say, I was never approached by Penguin or Bloomsbury about bringing the idea to life. I also reviewed the frustrating experience that was White Knight Chronicles II, and pondered why Microsoft was shoehorning the Kinect camera into titles that didn’t need it, rather than focusing on titles designed for it from the ground up such as Once Upon a Monster. Outside of this, I went to see Kung Fu Panda 2 which, as I wrote, was pretty excellent.

It took until July for the year to find some proper direction. Not long after making the jump to Mac, I decided that the world of software development wasn’t for me and left university. It took a lot of thinking but it’s a decision I still stand by today. Not so controversial were the leaked The Apprentice seriesregeneration ideas I got my hands on; frankly, whoever came up with them must’ve been a proper tosser, as they were all shit. Not so terrible was popping down to London again to catch up with friends for a few short hours and check out F1 2011; I might’ve been on a bus back home the same day, but when there’s a great game to preview I can’t say no.

July also saw me write up this year’s most popular article on why your Facebook photo is terrible, along words on the much-jibed passing of Amy Winehouse: not only should all death be respected, it shouldn’t be used as a shoebox to propel your morality above that of others, as I saw only a few hours later. As if that wasn’t enough, Louisa and I went to see the excellent close to the Harry Potter saga, the surprisingly alright Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Pixar’s Cars 2 which, while disappointing, was made richer by the accidental purchase of 2D tickets - it was an experience we both felt was made better without the gimmicky plastic specs.

The first half of 2011 was, it’s fair to say, pretty choc-a-bloc, and if you’d ended my year then I’d have been satisfied. The second half of the year, coming up in the next blog? It pretty much just spoiled me.