In an industry where almost every movie is either in IMAX or 3D, it’s a rarity to find a director who has yet to drink the Kool-Aid. So it comes as a big surprise that Warner Bros. has ordered director Guillermo del Toro to convert his epic robots-vs-monsters film, ‘Pacific Rim’, to 3D against his wishes.

Del Toro has yet to actually make a 3D film and at July’s San Diego Comic Con, he explained to Collider why he thought converting ‘Pacific Rim’ to a 3D format was a bad idea:

“I didn’t want to make the movie 3D because when you have things that big, the thing that happens naturally is you’re looking at two buildings at 300 feet.  If you move, the buildings don’t go like this (moves his hands closer together), there’s no parallax.  They’re so big that you barely notice anything no matter how fast you’re moving, so to force the 3D effect on robots and monsters that are supposed to be that high, you’re making them miniaturized, you’re making them human-scale.  I knew that the 3D effect sounded like a great idea, but it was gonna be counter.”

Warner Bros. obviously had other ideas as Variety is reporting that they “strong armed” the director to do the conversion.

The allure of a 3D upcharge, especially overseas, was obviously too hard to resist for the studio who obviously wants to make as much money as they can with the film. After all, the budget was an estimated $200 million. Combine that with the fact that China will only allow US films to be shown in their country if it is in 3D or IMAX, pretty much solidified in the studio’s minds that the conversion was necessary.

It’s pretty certain that del Toro will be overseeing the conversion process even if it is against his creative wishes to ensure that the quality of his film is still maintained. At least the release date has not been delayed as in the case of ‘Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters’ and ‘G.I Joe: Retaliation’ where the films were said to be pushed back at least 9 months for a 3D conversion to be done.

For those who want to see ‘Pacific Rim’ the way it’s meant to be seen (according to del Toro), Warner Bros. is still planning to release the 2D version alongside the 3D one.

So how to you feel about the conversion? Does the fact that it will be in 3D make you think the film will be any better?

‘Pacific Rim’ stars Charlie Hunnam, Idris Elba, Ron Perlman, Charlie Day, Burn Gorman, Clifton Collins Jr., Robert Maillet, and Rinko Kikuchi and is slated to be in theaters on July 12, 2013.