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...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 on their other screens would severely affect ticket sales." Add to this the reported hints of an embargo that could deprive...
...picture shot in the standard two dimensions, is perhaps 10% to 20% of the budget. A ticket for How to Train Your Dragon costs $12.50 in 2-D at a Manhattan movie house. For 3-D, it's $17.50 - a 40% surcharge. For the 3-D IMAX version, $19.50, or 56% higher. The better news for studios: many of the Friday and Saturday screenings are already sold out. (See the top 10 movies...
...said to be related to the studio's wish to have the Marvel hero do his cavorting in 3-D. Spielberg is in 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...
...Second, on remaking an old favorite. I'll tell you why the middle-aged critical Cassandras remember the 1981 version as a movie milestone: because when they first saw it, they were 11. Not that it didn't boast its antique charms, mostly in Harryhausen's nifty-creaky beasties, but these scenes consume perhaps 15 mins. of a two-hr. movie. The rest is a botch, as storytelling or spectacle. First we're up on Olympus in the company of some swank Brit actors - Laurence Olivier as Zeus, Claire Bloom as Hera, Maggie Smith as Thetis - whose contempt...
...sight of Andromeda strung up on a seaside platform like the most elegant bondage babe at Voyeur West Hollywood. But mostly this is strong, solid adventure, unsullied by the chic contempt of camp - and, despite its critics, well worth your dollars, at least for the 2-D version...