Jeffrey Katzenberg, the movie executive behind mega-hits "Beauty and the Beast" and "Shrek," now sees the future of the movie theater in 3-D films, complete with those pesky glasses.
On Thursday, the DreamWorks Animation CEO outlined his vision in front of a small group at the AMC movie theater downtown.
"The movie theater experience has not changed in many decades," Katzenberg said. "Meanwhile, the home experience has gone through extraordinary innovation in just the last decade. ... To some degree, people have stopped coming to movie theaters."
A solution? "Immersive story telling," Katzenberg said. The method? Three-D.
So all of his company's forthcoming releases, starting with "Monsters vs. Aliens" in March, will be best seen in theaters with glasses donned.
Katzenberg showed off three clips from "Monsters vs. Aliens," which tracks the fate of several monsters, who are forced by the U.S. government to repel an alien attack.
With the 3-D glasses, rubble from a collapsing Golden Gate Bridge flies out at the audience. Without them, everything looks slightly fuzzy.
Katzenberg said technology has advanced since the days when 3-D films frequently induced nausea.
Back then, he said, 3-D movies were typically seen using glasses with both a red and a blue lens. Two projectors would project the film side-by-side, often not perfectly in sync.
Now, Katzenberg said, 3-D films are viewed using glasses with polarized lenses (The reusable ones at Thursday's event looked like standard sunglasses). Only one projector is needed.
Taking advantage of the advances, Katzenberg said he had retooled his studio to work exclusively in 3-D from the first storyboard.
That contrasts with the approach of other studios, which have typically animated films in 2-D and then post-produced them in 3-D (such as Walt Disney Animation Studio's "Bolt").
"It raises the quality of the work in a very big way," Katzenberg said.
Katzenberg is imaginative about the shift, which he repeatedly equated in importance to the introduction of sound and color to films.
Still, the move to 3-D presents a number of logistical challenges that could threaten its widespread adoption.
It costs about $15 million more for DreamWorks to create a 3-D movie. In addition, it costs about $100,000 to update a movie theater so that it can show a film in 3-D.
That means that a customer will have to pay roughly $5 more to watch "Monsters vs. Aliens" in 3-D. Also, only certain theaters, mostly in the U.S., will be able to show the film in 3-D.
A 2-D version will be simultaneously released to movie theaters and later on DVD.
Katzenberg said he thought customers would be happy to dole out additional money for a "premium experience."
In fact, by the time the next Shrek movie comes out in 2010, Katzenberg expects 80 percent to 85 percent of theater admissions will be for the 3-D version of that film.
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