3D films back in cinema, but porn will lead.

Horror, animation and concert movies are out or on the way, but adult entertainment will push boundaries with the new technology.

This is the year Hollywood’s billion-dollar 3D movie gamble will be played out on the big screen, with dozens of 3D films, across all genres, set for release in the coming months. You can already watch the horror movie My Bloody Valentine in 3D; and Coraline, a stop-action 3D animated feature based on a story by Neil Gaiman, opens in May. Even the Jonas Brothers, a boyband, are jumping on the bandwagon with a 3D concert movie. More than 30 3D films are in production, including Avatar, the first feature directed by James Cameron since Titanic, due at the end of the year. 

Betting that the format will offer something consumers can’t get on their new HDTV screens at home, Hollywood is quickly converting cinemas and heavily promoting forthcoming 3D films such as the blockbuster Monsters vs Aliens. Its producer, DreamWorks, handed out 150m sets of special glasses so American viewers could get a taste of the experience by watching a 3D trailer at half-time during the recent Super Bowl.

As heavily as Hollywood is boosting the theatrical experience, however, it is at home that most people will experience the coming revolution. Companies such as Mitsubishi, Panasonic and Samsung are busily developing 3D TV systems. The market is expected to be worth $16 billion in the next decade. Most of the new Hollywood 3D films, though, won’t be available for home viewing until next year at the earliest. And there aren’t enough of them to fill more than a couple of days’ viewing. So where will the product come from for this new kind of television-watching?

“3D TV will be taken to the next level as the adult entertainment industry once again pushes the boundaries with new tech,” says the online technology site T3.com. “The porn industry is going nuts for it now, and that’s traditionally where all the innovation is — multiangle DVDs came about thanks to porn, after all.”

That should not be a surprise. Pornography has been the driving force behind every significant new entertainment delivery system in the past few decades — the VHS home-video revolution of the 1980s, the satellite TV boom of the 1990s, the internet today. Right now, porn distributors are at the forefront of developing the technology to stream and download video on the internet, and to find ways to make people pay for it.

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