James Cameron recently told Variety that he may spend the rest of his career shooting films exclusively in digital 3-D. The director’s current film, “Avatar,” is being shot in 3-D, for which Cameron helped design a 3-D camera light enough to carry on his shoulder. Cameron’s comments came as part of a list Variety has compiled of the top 30 executives, filmmakers, and tech gurus who are building the future of entertainment technology.

Cameron goes digital? Welcome to the club. There is a growing rift in Hollywood between the filmmakers, like George Lucas and James Cameron, who think digital filmmaking is the future of film and the advocates, like Steven Spielberg, who say that film will never go away. On one hand I don’t think you’ll ever see the end of real, old-fashioned film-making, at least not until digital can mimic the look of film, but as the digital technology gets cheaper, it’s going to be increasingly difficult to find studios willing to pay for the rising costs of film processing. 

Of course there’s always the x-factor that most theaters are still using film projectors, so until digital projectors get cheap enough for theaters to make the conversion, the way we watch movies in the theater will continue as scheduled unless you want to go out of your way to see a movie in digital 3-D. The sad thing is that I doubt 95% of the people who go to movies actually care how it’s presented. If anyone can create a mass conversion, though, the man who brought us “Titanic” is probably the one to do it.

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