A little over a week ago, MTV spoke with Zack Snyder and his wife/producer Deborah about the conversion of his upcoming movie Sucker Punch to 3D. At the time, Snyder didn’t seem convinced that they could do the movie’s visuals justice with the current conversion process.
At a terrific roadshow event for the couple’s other upcoming movie, the 3D animated adventure Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole–look for our coverage of that very soon–ComingSoon.net spoke with Deborah for a bit, and when we asked her whether Sucker Punch was still going to be in 3D, she essentially said “No,” for many of the reasons they mentioned to MTV a few weeks back. Essentially, the Snyders had been working with another company to do the conversion, who then got pulled into finishing up another movie. The most recent results of the 3D conversion tests they’d been doing haven’t met up to Snyder’s infamously scrutinous standards. Deborah told us (and we’re paraphrasing here) that what Zack has filmed and edited together looks so great in 2D already, they didn’t want to take away from it with a weak 3D conversion. In other words, they’re deliberately bucking the current knee-jerk trend to turn everything into 3D. Their next movie Legend of the Guardians is a very different story, because it was entirely conceptualized and visualized to be in 3D from the very beginning.
To be honest, the Snyders and Warner Bros. still have more than enough time to decide if converting to 3D will be feasible without taking away from what Zack is trying to do with his first entirely original film (as opposed to being adapted from other source material). After all, the movie isn’t scheduled for release until March 25, 2011. Warner Bros., who originally announced that Sucker Punch would be in 3D during the height of “Avatar-mania” earlier this year must be well aware of the recent backlash to weak last-minute 3D conversions from their own Clash of the Titans to M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender. We’ve also been seeing the percent of box office grosses of 3D to 2D drop quite dramatically over the past few releases, maybe because audiences are becoming dubious that 3D is necessary for every moviegoing experience, not to mention the added cost for tickets.
In the meantime, the Snyders will be bringing Sucker Punch to Comic-Con International in San Diego next week, and undoubtedly, the topic of 3D will arise and hopefully be addressed more directly by Zack (who we didn’t speak to about the conversion) and of course, Warner Bros. themselves.
