Has digital cinema finally found its killer app?
Filmless movie projection has been lurking just around the corner for nearly a decade, while movie studios and theater owners have bickered over the cost of scrapping the old projectors and installing the new. Now, for the first time, there's a sign that moviegoers are willing to walk past a conventional movie theater and line up for a digitally projected movie -- at higher ticket prices, yet.
The unlikely herald is Disney's computer-animated "Chicken Little," which received atrocious reviews before its Nov. 4 opening, but has been packing 'em in at digital 3-D presentations around the country.
The film grossed about $11,000 per screen at conventional theaters during its first weekend, but $25,000 per screen at more than 80 locations showing the 3-D version. The difference can't be accounted for by the extra $1 to $1.50 some 3-D theaters tacked onto admission prices, and if it held up this past weekend, the excitement in the digital-cinema community will be palpable. Unconfirmed reports are already swirling that several blockbuster 3-D features are heading our way, including Peter Jackson's remake of "King Kong."
3-D backers say that the technology is snazzy enough to overcome the main obstacle to a nationwide rollout of digital projection -- theater owners' doubts that it will be enough of an audience-pleaser to justify the $150,000 conversion cost per screen.
This isn't your father's 3-D, the novelty that turned B movies like 1952's "Bwana Devil" into objects of enduring mockery. It dispenses with the traditional red-and-green glasses in favor of polarized spectacles, which are supposed to eliminate the eyestrain that cursed old-style 3-D. The jitterless image produced by digital projectors can make the 3-D effect especially striking.
Two Southern California companies, In-Three Inc. and Real D, are leading the 3-D revival. Agoura Hills-based In-Three specializes in converting 2-D images to 3-D, a process it calls dimensionalization. Lucasfilm Ltd. has hired In-Three for the 3-D conversion of the "Star Wars" movies for a new cycle of releases starting in May 2007, the 30th anniversary of the original's premiere. The company says it has so much business now that it has expanded its workforce tenfold to about 150 and is moving into a 40,000-square-foot production complex.
"We've been telling people forever that 3-D is digital's killer app," says Gary Friedman, the company's vice president for corporate development.
