Seeing Numbers in 3-D

By Lyle Holmes

October 22, 2007 6:18 AM Permalink Comments (0)

New twist from an old technology

Back in 2005, I saw Chicken Little in Los Angeles. The film did big business for Disney. It was number one at theaters two weeks in a row, earning $80 million in fourteen days. The film didn’t do much for me, but it was obviously important for the Mouse-House. It was their largest opener since The Lion King and it went on to earn over $300 million worldwide.

The film was on 3,500 screens around the country. I was particularly interested in 80 of them. Disney was rolling out the Chicken in Disney Digital 3-D on approximately eighty screens. If you couldn’t get to a 3-D screen, you had to settle for the old-fashioned 2-D version.

It was the beginning of a new push to popularize movie going. Every couple of decades the theater business reinvents itself in some way. Silent pictures gave way to talkies. Color replaced black and white. When television, using the Academy aspect ratio, looked like it was going to be the king-killer, theaters rolled out widescreen in a variety of formats.

Fearing competition from digital downloads and other forms of entertainment, the theater business is once again reinventing itself. This weekend we saw another glimpse of the future of the theater business.

This weekend Disney re-released the edgy-animated feature Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas in 3-D. The success of the effort has flown under the radar screen of most industry pundits and reporters.

The movie was first released to theaters in 1993. It earned over $8 million on its opening weekend at 1,650 theaters. That’s about $5,000 per screen. That’s a very respectable number. This weekend the re-release rolled out to 546 screens and grossed more than $5 million. That’s over $9,100 per location! It was number eight this week, besting both Rendition and The Heartbreak Kid.

It wouldn’t surprise me if the re-release went on to earn $15 million. But that’s not the point. In a $10 billion dollar industry, $15 million is little more than a rounding error. Disney’s 3-D effort, using the Real D Cinema technology, is about transforming the movie-going experience.

No one has more at stake than the theater owners who supported the innovation. It’s a complicated business. Digital cinema is slowly gaining ground among theater owners and 3-D is an extension of the move to digital projection. It’s all very expensive: new projectors, house servers, digital backbones to deliver the picture to the projector, special screens and related technologies to enhance the 3-D experience.

For theater owners it is a billion dollar gamble they can’t afford to lose. In the end, it comes down to getting more seats in the seats and selling more popcorn and soda. Even with all the new gadgets and gizmos, maybe the theater business hasn’t really changed.

http://boxoffice.com/blogs/paul-dergerabedian/2007/10/welcome-to-your-blog-page-at-b.php