Tony Earnshaw: Expensive 3D cinema starts to lose that magic dimension for children

Mrs Earnshaw and I took the children to the movies a week or so back and coughed up the best part of £40 to see Disney’s Tangled in 3D.

Thankfully, we already had our 3D glasses from a previous excursion otherwise we’d have paid a surcharge for those. Throw in sweeties, drinks and then a post-film meal at a pizza franchise and the final bill hit our Visa card with a thud.

Of course the experience would have been mightily different had the film we had arranged to see, Alpha and Omega, not been sold out. What’s more, tickets for that one were but a quid or two each. Why? Because it’s an older movie.

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The rip-off that is the 3D phenomenon might be coming to an end with the implosion of the $175m motion-capture animated epic Mars Needs Moms, another Disney offering apparently so dire that parents have been staying away in their hundreds of thousands.

According to a report in the New York Times the film opened in 14 overseas territories representing a quarter of the international market and amassed a paltry $2.1m. It opens in the UK on April 8.

Shell-shocked Disney bosses have been struggling to comprehend the scale of the film’s failure. Already Mars Need Moms is being spoken of in the same terms as The Adventures of Pluto Nash and Cutthroat Island – both mega flops that made a dent in the history of Hollywood turkeys.

What is abundantly clear is that the family film market has become saturated with 3D product. What was once a treat has become so commonplace that the average weekly multiplex programme has become weighed down by mediocre movies overloaded with 3D technology.

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Robert Zemeckis, director of Forrest Gump and one of the producers of Mars Needs Moms, has seemingly been the fall guy for this all-round disaster movie. Disney has reportedly axed an update of the Beatles’ psychedelic ‘60s cartoon movie Yellow Submarine, which was set to be his next directorial project.

Clearly, Disney – indeed, the entire industry – is seriously rattled. Yet as Zemeckis pays the price, other big-name, big-budget filmmakers are ploughing ahead. James Cameron is planning not one but two sequels to Avatar and Steven Spielberg will release Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, another motion-capture movie.

All booms should eventually bust, and I suggest the 3D fad may be on the way out. And not before time. Parents struggling to entertain (and feed) the children on a soggy Saturday afternoon shouldn’t be paying through the nose for often second-rate amusement. And shouldn’t children be wowed by effects-laden films, not bored by technology that has become beyond routine?

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