From Bill Hunt at The Digital Bits we have our first real confirmation that Disney has no plans to release "Maleficent" on BluRay 3D in America. Like "Frozen" and "Need for Speed" though, you can get BluRay 3D versions from the U.K., China, and pretty much all other international territories that Disney ships disks to. There is no word on whether or not the 3D version will be a streaming exclusively through Vudu, but considering that's been the case for the aforementioned films there is a good chance of this. Thus Disney remains the most high profile studio in America to give 3D the shaft to their consumers. This is all the more ironic since on the same day Paramount Studios began taking pre-orders for Brett Rattner's "Hercules" on BluRay 3D. This is ironic because the film is neither as popular as "Maleficent" was nor did it garner much interest from the public (the movie only opened last week).
Hi everyone, my name is Kevin T. Rodriguez, and welcome to my new blog "Save BluRay 3D." This is pretty much our first news post here as a take a step away from my reviews and column writing to follow news and releases on the BluRay 3D market. It's fitting that "Maleficent" is the first news story to post about here since it was the main inspiration for creating the site in the first place. Keep in mind that I don't think "Maleficent" is a good movie by any real stretch, but for me the rumor of this movie not getting a BluRay 3D release in America was enough to get me started on the site. While it is true that 3D has been slow to be adapted into the home there are none-the-less a decent, dedicated section of film lovers who do enjoy movies with good 3D that can enhance the film.
For a small period of time there was a big push to get all the latest 3D movies onto disks as soon as possible. Disney was actually one of the biggest supporters of the format just a couple of short years ago. Recently there have been a shift where some movies that had 3D versions (or worse, were made in 3D) were not getting BluRay 3D releases. Small movies like "Free Birds" and "One Direction: This Is Us" were made with 3D in mind, but because those movies weren't that big (or whatever reason) they only got standard 2D BluRay releases in America. This really didn't concern me until Disney made the unpopular choice to cancel the BluRay 3D release of "Frozen" in America. I had a long YouTube rant you can watch here, but the idea to hold off on one of the biggest 3D movies in years was a truly baffling move to many of us.
"Frozen" was one of the biggest 3D hits theaters had the previous year along with "Gravity," and those two movies alone helped the format regain some love after many hastily converted 3D films made people tired of the format. Warner Bros. ended up releasing "Gravity" on BluRay 3D where it became the best selling BluRay 3D of all time. To top it all off, thanks to recent strong sales from other big 3D titles, BluRay 3D disks are likely to account for 35% of BluRay disks sales. Because of this it was certainly disheartening to see such a big company not give consumers the option to buy one of their biggest hits in years in 3D if they so wished to buy it as such. Then the upcoming Tinker Bell movie they made in 3D was not released on BluRay 3D, then "Need for Speed's" 3D was canned on disk, and now "Maleficent" is out. We're still getting "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" on BluRay 3D in America though, so it's not all bad.
Still, even though I wouldn't have bought these movies on any format it's a shame to think that the studios might start abandoning BluRay 3D's just because they are slightly more expensive than regular BluRay's and not as common (just as the market is on the verge of financially supporting them to boot). As much as everyone loves streaming, regulating the 3D versions to streams is the worst thing to do because most bandwidth (even in the comfy LA area...where yours truly lives) simply doesn't support it. No, I want to see that if a movie was available in 3D in theaters, that it be available in 3D on disk as well. Because this was a recent thing I wanted to try you might notice the site (nice as it looks so far) is incomplete. A lot of links don't work yet and some of our biggest features have yet to be uploaded.
In the very near future though we plan to have a comprehensive list of 3D movies in theaters that have not been released on BluRay 3D (it's a small list now, but I wanted to make it quick before it potentially got big). We'll of course report when 3D movies have BluRay 3D releases announced and when the announcement is absent. We're going to grade the studios at the end of every year to see if they're doing their job in getting these movies out to the general public the way they should be. In other words, this is going to be one of those massive blogs with way more information than you could possibly want for one particular thing. If you find yourself getting tired of reading about disk releases and whatnot, may I recommend a movie review website?
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