Word: cinerama
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...eagerly, for their business, their very existence, was threatened by another technological marvel - TV - that was keeping customers at home, getting drama, variety shows and old films for free. Movie houses were turned into video amusement parks: the image on the giant screens was suddenly wider (CinemaScope), grander (Cinerama), clearer (VistaVision) and deeper (3D) than ever before. The idea was to lure people back to theaters by giving them an experience that couldn't be duplicated in the living room. It didn't work: the number of tickets sold dropped from an all-time high of 4 billion...
...Dark Knight screenings were selling out online as fast as theaters could add them. The AMC South Barrington in Chicago planned to show the movie on six screens and ended up ordering more prints in order to play it on 18. A planned Friday midnight showing at Hollywood's Cinerama Dome sold out so quickly, its adjoining theater, the ArcLight, added 13 midnight screenings. Those midnight shows broke another record, earning $18.5 million, to beat out Star Wars, Episode III: The Revenge of the Sith's 2005 record of $16.9 million. And those numbers don't include the hardy fans...
...spritzed at the end. Journey also has a runaway-tram ride that will remind you of the one in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, but which I'd like to think is a tribute to the roller-coaster ride in the 1953 movie This Is Cinerama (another gimmick process that premiered in the middle of the original, short-lived 3D craze...
...organize your life with it, you can text messages. Cell phones tend to bring us more inside of our lives whereas movies offer a chance to escape, so there are two competing forces. One force is very old - from nickelodeons to silent movies to talkies to cinemascope to cinerama to IMAX. The other venue is the gadgets that sort of anchor us in one place and eat up the hours in our day, that makes us wait...
That's one future of movies--IMAX-size extravaganzas you can see only in a movie house. It's a throwback to the Cinerama and CinemaScope the studios used against the first home-viewing medium...