‘Mars Needs Moms’ May Sound Death Knell For 3-D Movies

The Disney film’s massive losses will have studios thinking twice about producing high-budget 3-D movies.

Disney was hoping Mars Needs Moms would be a blockbuster, but instead the movie that took $175 million to make took in only $7 million on its first weekend. Director Robert Zemeckis’s animation studio has been shut down and his planned 3-D remake of the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine has been scrapped, and analysts say the Moms flop could lead to a wider chill that scares off other studios from producing 3-D movies. Customers appear increasingly unwilling to pay the inflated price for 3-D films, some of which have been converted to 3-D in post-production to cash in on the fad. In the 1950s and 1980s, 3-D films enjoyed brief popularity before audiences grew impatient with their high prices and low quality.