For All Its Success, Will ‘Avatar’ Change the Industry?

That’s the title of a very interesting article from the NYTimes.com:

Even as James Cameron’s science-fiction epic “Avatar” continues to dazzle the audience with its visual wizardry, filmmakers and studios are struggling to figure out when, if ever, viewers can expect an equally striking on-screen experience.

Asked last week if any similarly ambitious film were in the works, Alec Shapiro, senior vice-president for sales and marketing of Sony Corporation’s content creation group, whose digital cameras were used on “Avatar,” was stumped. “Not to my knowledge,” he said. “I can’t, offhand, see another half-billion-dollar production.”

Mr. Cameron and his producing partner, Jon Landau, have talked of possible sequels to “Avatar.” But 20th Century Fox, which distributed the movie and helped underwrite production and marketing costs of about $460 million, has yet to announce plans for any successor to a film that was at least 15 years in the making.

In a research report published by Barclays Capital on Wednesday, Anthony J. DiClemente and George L. Hawkey called “Avatar” an “outlier”: a unique event that leaves the business environment around it largely intact.

“While ‘Avatar’ is likely a watershed for digital and 3-D technology,” they wrote, “it does not tell us that the underlying economics of the film business have changed.”

Mr. DiClemente and Mr. Hawkey predicted that “Avatar” would be a moneymaker, though they do not expect imitators anytime soon.

As for cinematic technology, the achievement of “Avatar” was not so much a single leap — like the one from silent film to sound — as an integration of complex filmmaking systems that allowed Mr. Cameron to combine live actors and computer animation in a relatively seamless, and believable, blend of fantasy and the real world. Critics and audiences noted a qualitative difference between what they saw on the screen in “Avatar” and what they saw in other recent films that used 3-D or motion-capture technology.

One more indication that Avatar is a unique phenomenon that will be hardly replicated by Hollywood anytime soon.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  I personally don’t find a 2D movie any less impressive than a 3D one, especially when technical wizardry isn’t the focus and every other element of the filmmaking process is well developed.