Two big movie studios are betting that you will place form over substance during summer 2009 and want theater owners to get off their butts and have everything ready for you. Both Dreamworks and Fox are preparing mega-budget 3-D movies for the Memorial Day two years from now and both want all of the available 3-D screens. Dreamworks will release Monsters vs. Aliens while Fox will counter with James Cameron’s Avatar. Both are expected to do huge business, but, as is noted in the Los Angeles Times, the fact that they're angling for the same release dates has some theater owners nervous.
Currently, about 700 screens are equipped to show 3-D movies. It requires sophisticated technical changes not just throwing giant blue/red cardboard glasses over the projector. The estimated number of 3-D capable screens is expected to be about 5,000 by mid-2009, but that’s not going to be enough if these two behemoths stick to their plans. In fact, Dreamworkers Animation honcho Jeffrey Katzenberg says he needs 6,000 screens for Monsters vs. Aliens. I’m not too good at math, but if Monsters vs. Aliens has all 5,000 screens plus 1,000 screens that aren’t really there, it seems that Avatar won’t be able to have a very wide opening.
At some point in the next 25 months, one of these guys will probably blink and move their date. The jockeying seems to be getting theater owners more committed to making the upgrades necessary to project 3-D, but going head to head will hurt the box office of both films. The key of course, will be if either of these movies is actually good, regardless of its presentation style. After Pixar was so successful with computer animation, many studios jumped on the bandwagon and found that it wasn’t the format of the presentation, it was the script, direction, and voice acting that made the movies worth seeing. Hopefully, these technological leaps will not overshadow the more important aspects of moviemaking.
