The Permanence of Three Dee --- Part XII

... and also why CG work will keep expanding:

Buoyed by the success of “Avatar,” ... the News Corporation reported a quarterly profit on Tuesday that surpassed the expectations of Wall Street analysts.

“Avatar,” ... released by News Corporation’s 20th Century Fox film studio, has generated nearly $600 million at the North American box office, and more than $2 billion worldwide ... All four of the company’s biggest businesses — broadcast TV, cable TV, newspapers and movies — reported increases in both revenue and operating income.

Every other conglomerate looks at the performance of Jim Cameron's epic and goes: "Aaaaaah.".

The one thing I know about our entertainment companies is, they jump on bandwagons. If glossy musicals are suddenly the Big Money-Making Thing, studios will make glossy musicals. If three dimensional space operas with lots of animation and mo-cap make sizable bucks, then that's the direction everybody will go.

I watched this scenario play out in 1990-1995, when movie companies attempted to emulate the Aladdin-Lion King juggernaut and failed. We ended up in a train wreck, but wow was there a lot of employment for five or six years.

So will the ever-expanding universe of CG animation someday come to an end? Or crash? It's always possible, but the dynamics are different than they were in the middle 1990s. While Disney animation was the only big winner a decade and a half ago, now many companies are doing well producing animation. (Alvin and the Chipmunks from Fox has doubled The Princess and the Frog's holiday take.) And big budget live-action features use CG animation extensively.

So will there be more animators, lighters, surfacers and compositors three years from now? You betchya.