I write this post with much resentment and sadness, but it turns out that DreamWorks "Trolls" hit BluRay yesterday without a BluRay 3D version. Despite being announced to have one, no retailer (including Amazon) is selling the movie in 3D, and since this was far from one of the biggest hits of the year, there is very little chance of us getting one. Now, this one pains me more than most to have to report. Not because "Trolls" was an especially good movie or anything. But rather because when it comes to 3D, DreamWorks Animation has been producing some of the best 3D content out of all the studios. They really have taken the format and turned it into an art with pretty much every movie they've released. "Trolls" was no exception, and I admit that I was going to buy it on the sheer basis that I wanted to watch a few of the scenes in its glorious 3D images. Looks like there will be no revisiting of those images, and I'll just have to hold them close in my memory.
This does beg the question though of why this is? Is it the recent announcement that LG and Sony are out of the 3D TV market? Is it the fact that Jeffery Katzenburg, one of the biggest fans of 3D entertainment, is no longer at the company? Or is it that after the Comcast buyout, DreamWorks Animation might not even be making movies much longer anyway, and that parent company Universal just wants to unload the remaining movies as cheaply as possible? Who knows what it is. I mean, the first COULD be the reason, but why would Universal still have a BluRay 3D of "Sing" coming out? Or is that going to be cancelled as well? Look, I'm not ignorant when I say I know there's a good chance BluRay 3D's might quietly be cancelled from this point on. If no more 3D TV's are in production, why release disks that have a maximum value? The thing is, we still don't know if 4K is really going to save the TV market like the businesses say it will (they said the same thing about 3D after all).
We have no idea if the feature will be put back in when enough people ask for it (and I sense there are people who at least want it as a feature if nothing else). 3D TV's are still being produced for the Chinese and European markets, so why not make it available for them? They produced a UltraHD BluRay for the movie, so why couldn't they just thrown the disk in that package since people are already paying a lot for it in the first place? Universal is sort of puzzling me on the BluRay 3D releases because they still produce them for certain movies, but not others. Maybe it's a box office thing? Who knows. All I know is that until a final decision is made about the future of DreamWorks Animation, they still produce some of the best 3D content out there. They produce content that look significantly less impressive in 2D, so to not release "Trolls" in 3D is insulting. There is also no import or Vudu stream available for this. I mean, come on Universal, I know it wasn't the biggest hit of the year, but unlike "Sing" at least it's nominated for an Academy Award.
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