The record, read
The disc stopped coming
3D did not die when studios stopped making 3D films. They did not stop. What stopped was the disc.
Every figure in this piece is counted from the catalogue when the page is built, so the sentences move when the record does.
The story everyone tells about 3D is that audiences got bored after Avatar, the surcharge annoyed them, and the format quietly went away. The catalogue does not support that. It holds 1,097 films released in 3D, and 145 of them arrived in this decade. Films are still being shot and converted in stereo. 44 of them are from 2025 or later.
What changed is what happens after the cinema. Of the 694 films from the 2010s in this record, 375 have a Blu-ray 3D somewhere in the world, 54 per cent of them. Of the 145 from the 2020s, 32 do. That is 22 per cent. Narrow it to the last two years and the number is 3.
Bar width is films released; the filled section is those with a 3D disc recorded anywhere. Counted from this catalogue, which is still being filled — the 2020s figure will rise a little and will not close the gap.
What a format dying actually looks like
A 3D film in 2012, the busiest year in this record with 102 releases, was a thing you could buy. It came home on a disc with two full-resolution eyes on it, it sat on a shelf, and it worked whether or not the studio that made it still cared. That is what owning something means.
A 3D film in 2026 is a thing you can visit. 317 of them are on the Apple TV store and 48 on Disney+, and both are excellent — genuinely better presented than most discs ever were, on hardware built for it. But a licence is not a shelf. The catalogue already records one service withdrawing 3D across eleven European countries over a patent dispute, which is not a thing a disc can do.
The second-hand market is the format's real archive
Because the discs stopped being pressed rather than stopping existing, the record of what you can still get is a record of what somebody is reselling. Prices in this catalogue, read from one British chain, run from £0.50 to £85.00. The cheap end is not a bargain bin so much as a measure of how little a dead format is worth to a shop; the expensive end is scarcity, and it is where the format's best work has ended up.
This is the part worth stating plainly, because it is the reason this site exists. A 3D release that was never pressed has nowhere to go when the service drops it. A 3D release that was pressed will outlive every company involved in making it, sitting in a shop in Grantham for £3. Those two futures look identical on a cinema listing and could not be more different ten years on, and almost nobody is writing down which is which.
Every figure here is counted from the catalogue when this page is built, not typed into the copy. If the record changes, the sentences change with it. See what is on disc.