If you were at the European Cinema Expo last year, and who wasn’t, you heard DreamWorks Animation big poobah Jeffrey Katzenberg talk about how digital 3-D was the wave of the future. He said that European theater owners needed to get off the pot and start doing costly upgrades to be able to show the plethora of digital 3-D movies set to roll out starting in 2009. Unfortunately, not many European theater owners (or maybe over there it is theatre owners) listened to Katzenberg last year. No problem though, he just took the same speech over there this year and did it again.
According to HR, Katzenberg again pleaded with European theaters at the Cinema Expo to get ready for the 3-D revolution. “One year ago, I stood here and first spoke to you about 3-D," he said, "I think this is the single greatest opportunity in 70 years.” Based on current efforts, Europe is going to miss this opportunity. Europe has about 150 digital 3-D equipped screens compared to about 1,000 in the U.S. We Americans love it when we get something big coming right at our faces!
Katzenberg’s 3-D mania roadshow probably has less to do with it being the greatest opportunity since Scarlet O’Hara sold her body to save Tara and more with DreamWorks Animation’s move to digital 3-D movies only. Katzenberg showed clips at Cinema Expo of 2009’s Monsters vs. Aliens, which is all about the 3-D experience. So, Katzenberg is clearly a man on a mission, look for him at a movie theater convention near you!
