Focus on the other dimension

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Coming soon, and coming straight at you: houseflies in astronaut suits, Brendan Fraser boldly exploring the earth’s core and an animated, nearly 50-feet-tall she-monster with Reese Witherspoon’s voice.

Energised by impressive profits from the pioneering Polar Express (2004) and last year’s Meet the Robinsons — not to mention the phenomenally successful Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour — Hollywood is finally starting to bring 3-D movies to market. Theatre owners are spending heavily to be ready with new projectors, screens, eyeglasses and higher ticket prices when those films start to arrive in multiplexes.

Here at ShoWest — the annual gathering of theatre owners and vendors — bulky 3-D eyewear is almost as omnipresent as overfed conventioneers with name tags. And studios promoting their slates for this year and next are shining the brightest spotlight on their 3-D titles. New Line Cinema and Walden Media are screening Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D, a live-action adventure with Fraser as the hero of their adaptation of the Jules Verne novel. Summit Entertainment is showing bits of Fly Me to the Moon, an animated comedy about youthful bugs that sneak aboard the Apollo 11 mission.

And DreamWorks Animation’s chief executive, Jeffrey Katzenberg, chose a prime slot at the opening ceremony to unveil a sequence from Monsters vs Aliens, his studio’s spoof of 1950s science-fiction movies. Witherspoon stars in the film, set for release just over a year from now.

Industrywide, there could be as many as 10 movies released in 3-D in 2009, said Katzenberg, who has become the format’s biggest missionary. But so far, fewer than 900 theatre screens nationwide have had costly 3-D systems installed. And until that number reaches 5,000, Katzenberg and other distribution executives say, 3-D movies will also need to be released in the 2-D format. (By comparison, the 2-D movie Shrek the Third opened on about 10,000 screens.)

In the short term, the slow rollout of 3-D projection systems raises the spectre of a competitive bloodbath, as too many movies overwhelm the available outlets. That’s what happened, for example, when the Hannah Montana film quickly knocked out U2 3D, a U2 concert film that had opened on 3-D screens a week earlier.