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Tom Houseman: Right, because audiences always pay attention to what critics say. Audiences react to new advancements in technology the way I react to the crazy sales on chocolate the day after Easter. They gorge themselves until they're sick of it. The movies that jumped on this trend early are gonna be successful just because 3-D is new and exciting, but eventually audiences are gonna get tired of bad movies in 3-D. Eventually 3-D will have its "Ant Bully," a movie so bad that it will cause the new technology to lose its luster. Then things will settle down and only the biggest movies will be in 3-D. It seems like that's the way it worked with CGI and that's how its gonna be with 3-D.

David Mumpower: I fall somewhere in the middle on this subject. I believe that all aspects of movie consumption are predicated upon positive reinforcement. If you enjoy the movie you paid the significant 3-D ticket price to see, you will feel encouraged to repeat the action in order to achieve another satisfactory outcome. If you have something happen like we did with Avatar and your projector breaks with five minutes left or if you hate a movie and cannot believe how much money you wasted on it, you won't. Currently, people are enjoying an unprecedented run of quality animated fare coinciding with the truly revolutionary visuals of Avatar. Next on the horizon is Iron Man 2 with a villain whose electro-whips look stunning. Soon afterward, Toy Story 3 comes out and it is a foregone conclusion to become the biggest Pixar opener of all-time with the only question being how high it goes. As Tom stated, the only thing that will derail this object in motion is a negative movie-going experience that lingers and I'm of the opinion it probably takes a few in a row for people to start feeling as if 3-D isn't what it's cracked up to be. With consumer television hyping this new technology for the next 9 months, I will be surprised if the 3-D money train ends any time soon.

Reagen Sulewski: If James Cameron can flex his muscle and get a set of standards in place, 3-D will be in much better shape for the forseeable future. Crappy conversions like Clash of the Titans do weaken the brand, but also let's not forget this is a technology in its infancy. Studios have just started seeing dollar signs and are converting all their potential blockbusters to try and get on the bandwagon, but it's usually years from development to completion for a project. These early slapdash efforts are going to eventually bleed away and if the tech can make it a couple years without a backlash, we'll see a lot more quality 3-D productions.

David Mumpower: That is an exceptional point. This is similar to the first generation of videogames for a new console. Those invariably look dated as programmers learn more about the system. 3-D technology is no different in this regard.

Matt Huntley: What I hope is that 3-D remains a specialty and doesn't become a standard. Personally, the format doesn't do much for me (I saw both Alice and Titans in 2-D and didn't prefer either from a story/quality filmmaking point of view, so I would hate the idea of only 3-D screenings be available and paying more money just to see an extra dimension of a lousy story). That is my hope. However, what I believe to be reality, and this could be a good thing, is that 3-D will become so common that studios are forced to re-evaluate the stories they tell and really begin to flesh out the quality of their pictures. They will need some way to distinguish their movies from the competition, and with all the movies (more or less) looking the same with that extra dimension, their distinctiveness will be at the screenplay level. Remember when computer-animated features were a rarity and it seemed audiences would pay to see them no matter what? Now they're a dime a dozen and if they're not well made, people won't pay for them (e.g. Planet 51). When they're great (e.g. Ratatouille), audiences look to the story and not the format. Maybe the onslaught of 3-D will raise the quality of each movie because its quality will be the only sure-fire way for it to stand out.

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