The Last Airbender

The critics got their knives out for The Last Airbender last week — the film earned an abysmal “8 percent fresh” rating from movie-review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. In a summer that included such critically reviled releases as The A Team and Jonah Hex, Airbender was singled out as a punching bag, and an unusual amount of scorn was reserved for the film’s 3D effects.

In the L.A. Weekly, Robert Wilonsky called it “Ugly … if you’re forced to see it in 3-D.” The venerable Roger Ebert griped, “It’s a known fact that 3D causes a measurable decrease in perceived brightness, but Airbender looks like it was filmed with a dirty sheet over the lens.” In The New York Times, A.O. Scott decries “a last-minute 3-D conversion that wrecks whatever visual grace or beauty might have been there.” Movieline writer Kyle Buchanan admitted, “I watched almost half of it with my 3D glasses off.” And so on.

The stereography experts who do this for a living know that the current standard of highly accelerated production schedules for 3D conversions are a compromise. Given more time, they could do a better job and head off many of the complaints about “fake 3D.” Of course, movie reviewers aren’t necessarily privy to the technical details of a production like this, and a critical pile-on seems to mean increasingly little at the box-office — there were widespread critical complaints about 3D in Clash of the Titans, too, but audiences didn’t seem to care, and Warner Bros. has to be happy with that film’s eventual near-$500 million worldwide gross.

But despite Airbender‘s healthy take at the North-American box-office ($70 million to date) there are signs that audiences are unhappy. At the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Goldstein blogs this: “According to CinemaScore, the company that tracks opening-night reaction from moviegoers in dozens of cities across the country, first-night moviegoers — the people most excited about seeing Last Airbender — gave the film a woeful C.” (That might not sound so bad, but as CinemaScore grades go, a C is exceptionally low.)

What’s not clear is whether audiences (as opposed to critics) are reacting poorly to the 3D, and whether it will impact their decision to spend their moviegoing dollars supporting the 3D price premium on future releases. Nobody’s complaining about the 3D in Toy Story 3, for instance. And, as blogger David Poland succinctly breaks down the economics behind Airbender‘s 3D, last-minute conversions are still a winning proposition for the studios, whether Ebert likes it or not: “Assuming 20% of the box office gross comes from the 3D premium, the $5m conversion investment grossed $14 million this weekend and returned more than $7m to the studio. Profitable choice.”

Fair enough, but Avatar was the success story that made the current 3D boom possible. More native-3D blockbusters are on the horizon (including, reportedly, Transformers 3), but without another Avatar in the near future, studios may be well-advised to start budgeting more time and money for the 3D conversion process — before cash-strapped filmgoers start to rebel against it.