Time magazine agreeably envisions the movies’ digital 3-D future in a way guaranteed to please its picture boys, Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and James Cameron.

The new digital 3-D isn’t going to work for the studios without a lot of stories like this, which play up the technique’s wow factor and play down the retro aspects (kids are still going to have to wear glasses) and the not-quite-iffy but definitely unestablished business prospects.

Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but it felt to me like the writer, Josh Quittner, was making everything seem as hunkily dory as possible. Consider this, from early in the piece:

But proponents say digital 3-D is a different animal from the analog stuff that came before 2005. Viewers often wore cardboard glasses with red and cyan cellophane lenses … As just about everyone knows, old-school 3-D was less than awesome.

Note the past tense in that second sentence. Sure sounds like you don’t have to wear those dumb glasses any more! It’s not until the end of the story we get this:

Gone are the completely cheesy cardboard glasses, replaced with slightly less cheesy disposable plastic-frame glasses that have gray lenses.

It doesn’t help that the piece boasts a correction:

The original version of this story misstated the cost of the film Avatar as being in excess of $300 million. The correct figure is in excess of $200 million.

Avatar is Cameron’s long-awaited super-duper spectacular, done in motion capture and digital 3-D, set for release this December. Variety has said the budget is an estimated $250 million to $300 million, and that was more than six months ago.

As the LAT’s Patrick Goldstein has recently demonstrated, film budgets are fungible figures. Avatar might cost $300 million to make, but tax credits could drop the price down 10 or 15 percent. (Of course, the studios will also lie about the budget, too.)*

Still, in the end, you’d have to be crazy to believe that Avatar is not going to cost a lot closer to $300 million than $200 million. (Evan Almighty had an official cost of $175 million two years ago, and reliable reports had it at $200 million. What do you think the chances are that James Cameron can make a movie for less money than Tom Shadyac?**)

Crazy or … kind of a tool. So why did Time make that craven correction? To an outsider, it sure looks like it was made to assuage the ego of a temperamental story subject.

Finally, the real issue with digital 3-D—unmentioned in the story—is how it will transfer to folks’ living rooms. One of the beauties of the process is that it can make a seamless 2-D version. But as the bottom drops out of the DVD market the mechanics of getting your money back on big budgets is getting more complicated.

Can studios and hardware makers agree on a 3-d home video standard? If they do, will it be a inferior one, or the gold standard of two HDMI inputs delivering at 1080p per eye? Will kids sit in their living rooms with glasses on?

The WSJ yesterday treated the subject with a lot more distance:

While the 3-D technology on display in films like “Monsters vs. Aliens” is more sophisticated, it remains to be seen whether people will still be drawn to it after its novelty has worn off. Many theater owners say they wonder if it makes sense to raise ticket prices more in a downturn. And the technology, which relies on actually going into theaters, may have little effect on home-video sales, which have boosted studio profits for years but fell about 9% in 2008, according to Adams Media Research.

p.s.: Cameron is a lunkhead in a league of his own, but it’s also true he directed the two Terminator movies and one of the highest-grossing films of all time, Titanic, so he can’t be written off. But the Anne Thompson piece reminded me of another Variety interview with Cameron, which began with this priceless quote, an ineffable distillation of the utter artlessness of his psyche:

I believe that Godard got it exactly backwards. Cinema is not truth 24 times a second, it is lies 24 times a second. Actors are pretending to be people they’re not, in situations and settings which are completely illusory. Day for night, dry for wet, Vancouver for New York, potato shavings for snow.

I imagine Cameron holding court at the Marmont, acolytes like Michael Bay and Brett Ratner in attendance, hanging on his every word:

“Hitchcock said that actors should be treated like cattle, but that’s ridiculous. Cattle are held in stalls and left to stand around in meadows all day and eat grass! Actors are human!”

“They say that money can’t buy love, but I think it can. I bet I could find someone, and pay them, like $1000 a day to, literally, love me. If they didn’t, they’d get fired. Why do people say that when it’s demonstrably not true?”

* Uncorrected in the story is this assertion:

Avatar is filmed in the old “Spruce Goose” hangar, the 16,000-sq.-ft. space where Howard Hughes built his wooden airplane.

The Spruce Goose wouldn’t fit in a building that size. I think there’s a zero missing.

**  T2 cost about $175M in today’s dollars. Anne Thompson at Variety:

By way of comparison, Cameron’s Terminator 2 had 42 shots with CG characters. Avatar has 1700.