Word: showings
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...least, not when the movie's in 3-D. Only about 4,000 of the 39,000 screens in North American theaters are currently equipped to show movies in the suddenly megafashionable format, and though theater chains are scrambling to convert more screens, they and the studios still feel the shortage. This weekend there will be an unprecedented 3-D-theater traffic jam as Clash of the Titans joins last week's box-office champ How to Train Your Dragon and the Disney blockbuster Alice in Wonderland. That could make this the first weekend in movie history when...
...mouth but lousy for business. So to secure 3-D screens for their product, some studio bosses have been playing old-fashioned hardball. The week before How to Train Your Dragon opened, the Los Angeles Times reported that "Paramount Pictures is telling theaters that if they don't show the upcoming DreamWorks-produced Dragon on a 3-D screen, then it will withhold from the theater a 2-D version of the movie to play instead ... Many multiplexes only have a single 3-D screen, so not having a conventional version of the highly anticipated DreamWorks family film to play...
...exhibitors that the number of 3-D screens would hold for two weeks. This put a serious crimp in the release of Clash of the Titans, whose opening was delayed a week, both to complete the film's reformatting in 3-D and to secure more venues that could show it in that format. Clash opens Friday on about 1,500 3-D screens and 2,000 2-Ds. Industry analyst Jeff Bock of Exhibitor Relations says Clash might have been expected to earn about $100 million this weekend - if it had secured all the 3-D screens it needed...
...same price for a movie that cost $250 million to make (say, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince) as for one that cost $15,000 (Paranormal Activity). But 3-D changes all that. You can charge audiences the moon to see a 3-D movie, and if you show it, they will come. The extra cost of making a movie in the format, or of jerry-building 3-D effects on a picture shot in the standard two dimensions, is perhaps 10% to 20% of the budget. A ticket for How to Train Your Dragon costs...
...postproduction on his 3-D Tintin movie. Will other moguls dare make the next film in the Transformers or James Bond franchise in a flat-screen version? It's more likely that producers, seeing the stratospheric grosses for Avatar and Alice and the quadrupling of screens able to show films in any format, will go where the money...