Focus on the other dimension

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: as James Cameron’s highly anticipated 3-D action movie, Avatar. But Katzenberg blinked, pushing up his film’s release by two months. Avatar was subsequently pushed back to December 18 for production reasons. Katzenberg then delayed a December 2009 DreamWorks release, How to Train Your Dragon, to March 2010, to avoid being squeezed between the animated Christmas Carol, starring Jim Carrey, set for release by Disney on November 6, 2009, and Avatar.

For the most part the 2009 calendar has been smoothed out, but one bottleneck remains, according to Rentrak, which collects industry data. Two 3-D films are currently set for release on July 24, 2009: Piranha, a horror remake from Dimension, and Disney’s animated G-Force, about a squad of guinea pigs sent to stop an evil billionaire from taking over the world.

While studios have been readying their 3-D products, theatre owners haven’t embraced the new technology quite as fast. The biggest brake on the 3-D rollout has been the slow expansion of digital projection systems, which are steadily replacing film projectors at multiplexes nationwide. So far, just 4,600 out of about 37,000 movie screens have been converted to digital.

Studios have been subsidising the conversions, which cost theatres about $75,000 for each auditorium, with “virtual print fees” approximating their savings from not having to print and ship hundreds of film reels for each release. But Michael Karagosian, a technology consultant to the National Association of Theatre Owners, said film companies like Kodak and Agfa have responded to the threat of digital cinema by lowering their prices for film prints, reducing studios’ appetite for big digital subsidies. (A deal announced to help convert up to 10,000 screens to digital included an $800 subsidy, down from $1,000 in an earlier round.)

Even with the subsidies, theatre owners have to pay about 1.7 times as much for digital systems over time as they do for projectors, because of high maintenance costs and short equipment life spans, Karagosian said. Film projectors, by contrast, are much like Cadillacs in Cuba, kept humming for decades with cheap replacement.