>Do 3-D Movies Mean The Death Of Film Projectors In Our Theaters?
Meet The Robinsons just gave us a big clue…
Everyone knows that technology right now is pushing our little personal worlds to change on a daily basis. It’s bringing upon us a new way to look at just about everything connected to our senses, expect maybe smell (unless you count the smell that your overly-abused iPod Nano takes on after the many sweaty places it’s been). So here’s a line of thinking that is pretty clear to follow, yet I’ll be the first to brand it. Hmmm, let’s call it the “magic box theory.” As a filmmaker it makes me sad, but I’ll explain:
In the 1950s, there was this ‘magic box’ that seeped its way into just about every household in America. On it, you would get magical moving pictures, news and advertisments of your favorite kitchen appliances and soap powder. I’m not sure if you’ve ever heard of this ‘magic box’ but trust me when I say, it changed the world. When it did, the movie studios were paranoid as hell and planned a massive counter attack. They created wide screen formats like CinemaScope, VistaVision and Cinerama and launched a primitive 3-D process so as to offer people something they couldn’t get in their living rooms on their brand new 10- and 12-inch black & white screens. And never guess what? It worked. People still kept going to the movies.
So what about now, you ask, when the ‘magic boxes’ turned into ‘magic picture frames’ in the form of 40-60 inch Hi-def plasma screens as the centerpiece of home theater systems fully equiped with digital suround sound? And what about the small screens we can carry in our pockets anywhere and the ability to watch high-quality video on our computers? The answer: digital, theatrical 3-D. And yes, it too is working.
As of April 1, 2007, there are roughly 4,000 digital screens throughout the world capable of projecting a 3-D film. Last weekend Disney’s 3-D version of Meet the Robinsons made over $7 million dollars on 581 digital screens out of the total $25 million theatrical take. Pretty impressive when you realize that there were only a total 84 digital screens at the end of 2005. This means that the exhibitors are retrofitting and/or adding digital projectors that project digital ‘prints’ stored on harddrives or other digital mediums. In just over 15 months, an astounding 3,900 more digital screens were added, a feat that was widely viewed just five years ago by the film industry as impossible because of the inhibitive costs associated with converting a theater to a digital space. Texas Instruments, the developer of the DLP cinema chip, projects by the end of 2007 about 7,000 digital screens in the world marketplace.
Disney introduced the 3-D version of Meet the Robinsons in a simple, yet very effective way. Infact, I would call it brilliant. When a showing of the normal version of the film was sold out, the theater’s spillover screen had the 3-D digital projector. Though most of them didn’t initially want to see the picture on a digital screen, the audiences loved it. Congratulations, Disney, by combining a fun 3-D experience with a viewing choice that has a stigma, you opened the minds of your ticket buyers and proved to the world that digital cinema is good enough, and 3-D is not just a novelty. It’s here to stay.
Additionally, a welcome advantage to the digital format is its potential delivery methods. Right now it costs roughly $150 per film print to ship anywhere in the USA. When you’re talking 4,000 screens for Spiderman 3, that’s over $600,000 in shipping costs alone. It costs about $25 to ship a harddrive with a film loaded onto it. And, of course, nowadays it costs just about nothing to deliver the print via a fiber connection or satellite feed.
In other words, it’s becoming so attractive for an exhibitor to NOT show a movie on film, that we are in jeopardy of losing our film-based movie screens at a break-neck pace. And I want to be very clear here to those of you who care: the most accurate manner to watch a movie shot on film is by seeing it projected on film. The best digital projectors right now are projecting 4,000 lines of resolution. A 35mm film comes in at 6,000+ lines. The exhibitors bank on you not caring about the missing 2,000 lines because it’s ‘good enough’ to get us movie-watching schmucks to keep buying tickets anyway.
There’s a reason why Spielberg still cuts film and doesn’t edit his movies digitally. Everyday he can touch the film with his hands because it’s a physical entity, a reasurrance that what you just spent $100 million dollars on is tangible and not somewhere in a digital storage bin. And perhaps a more important reason comes when it’s time to screen the cut. That’s right, even though it’s not color timed yet, it’s screened on film — the most accurate way to watch and evaluate how the cut of a film feels that was shot on film. Call him crazy.
Well that’s it, the magic box theory sparked by digital 3-D films. I hope I’m wrong, but the world is a changin’ and I don’t think Spielberg, our favorite traditionalist, is even powerful enough to stop that.
What do you think? Let us know!
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