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.

Always leery of leaving money on the table, the studios are jockeying for dates free of 3-D competition. Monsters vs Aliens at first was set for release on May 15, 2009, the same day 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.