The Return of the King!

Great news this week for fans of classic cinema and specifically for the Jurassic Park community, of which I am a very very avid member: come July 2013, the first Jurassic Park movie will finally return to theatres worldwide! Fully recognizing its 20^th anniversary (yes, it's really been that long ago and we've all gotten really old), Universal Pictures will re-release it in all its glory, bringing the rampaging dinosaurs back to the silver screen for older generations to fondly remember in an orgy of excessive nostalgia and for the younger generation, which has remaind blatantly ignorant of its awesome power in theatres, to finally re-discover in the way it looks best, on the big screen. It seems the small scale re-release in the UK (lucky bastards!) of late september was indeed, as many JP fans speculated it was, meant to test the waters for a potential full scale re-release around the globe. The waters apparently have been deemed favourable enough, considering JP drew in respectable numbers for a movie which only ran in a limited number of theatres and was withheld a basic advertising and marketing campaign of any kind, so the Brits only knew it was running in their local movie theatres if they stumbled upon it, or if they'd been perceptive enough online to know what cinematic gold they were bestowed upon by the studio executive powers that be. But now the whole world will have a chance to enjoy these animals again in all their glory of old...

...with one slight addition to the whole...

…as it will be a much dreaded 3-D re-release. People who know me will recall I'm not at all in favour of post-converting movies in 3-D, especially if these movies are decades old and were fully compelling to begin with and thus not in need of any extra dimensions. However, in the current movie market, re-releasing a classic without the added 3-D effect (and thus the additional admission ticket costs, which studios and theatres crave so much), is simply 'not done'. So we'll have to sit through JP watching it with an extra dimension, and hope they did a good enough job to make it look better, instead of worse. If we take the recent example of Star Wars Episode I 3-D, it will likely be the latter. That particular re-release was not improved by the 3-D effects at all. In fact, the 3-D was hardly noticeable and severely underwhelming considering all the ruckus with which Lucasfilm had previously announced it. In the Netherlands, it flopped big time, despite being Star Wars (because no matter how disappointing the 3-D turned out to be, seeing Star Wars on the silver screen again still was throughly enjoyable, even in the case of Episode I). Jurassic Park will undoubtedly receive a similar treatment, being a big franchise name which the studio will feel is appealing enough for the general audience, so it won't have to pull out all the stops to make the 3-D really worthwhile as spectators will flock to their theatres anyway, or so the studio hopes. Unless of course, studio executives got the message Star Wars Episode I 3-D delivered, namely re-releasing a big name franchise film with lousy 3-D just won't be enough these days. Even though I hate to compare JP to Episode I, it is the closest example.

Fortunately July 2013 is still a while away, so Universal has ample time left to decide on a potent strategy for making this re-release a success, and maybe even have their effects magicians come up with excellently added 3-D effects after all (though that seems less likely). Let's see how Titanic 3-D does first next month. Maybe the Star Wars Episode I 3-D incident will prove to have been just that, an incident, involving an already much maligned film adorned with less than stellar 3-D post-conversion.

For now, I'm thankful Jurassic Park gets re-released at all (and I sincerely hope it reaches Dutch theatres, since not all re-releases do). Even if the 3-D turns out to be utter trash, it will be very hard to ruin this film, considered by me as the grandest of all motion pictures, for me or my fellow JP fanatics. After all, I haven't seen it in theatres for nearly 20 years... but fortunately Ian Malcolm turned out to be right: life has, again, found a way!