Three-dimensional film has long provided a home for creepy-crawly special effects and sci-fi extravaganzas. But IMAX wants you to forget Creature from the Black Lagoon and those paper shades and think Beauty and the Beast instead. IMAX is hoping that Hollywood's animators will turn their children's hits into 3-D films for the really big screen.
Over Thanksgiving, IMAX opened its latest giant screen feature - an eye-popping dramatic version of the Nutcracker - with an animated short film called Paint Misbehavin'. The cutsey 2-minute comedy short was designed to showcase IMAX's new 3-D animation system, SANDDE, which allows animators to use virtual-reality-style headsets to "draw" in space using a wand instead of a mouse or keypad. The system can be applied post-production as well - IMAX could get Cinderella to dance right into a rapt audience with a mere US$5.5 million of work.
"We see it as an ancillary window," says co-CEO Brad Wechsler, who is proposing that IMAX could turn films like Toy Story into 45-minute 3-D features. "After the theatrical run and before the home video release, put it out in an IMAX stereoscopic 3-D release - it's like another revenue stream."
Three-dimensional films were conceived in the early 1900s as a stereoscopic Viewmaster-style device, but they became widespread in the 1950s through famous red-blue lenses. Though in recent years 3-D glasses have occasionally popped up as a novelty (usually in theatrical flops like Nightmare on Elm Street Part 6), IMAX has persisted in pushing 3-D as a viable medium, chanting the mantra, "Kids love it."
When IMAX released its first 3-D film in 1986, it used old-style polarized glasses. Currently, IMAX has upgraded its system to make use of electronic liquid-crystal shutter glasses that blink alternately 48 times a second. Each eye thus sees the images from one of two distinct prints of the film, taken from slightly different perspectives, simulating the mind's natural perception of depth.
Not only does IMAX laud the results of the SANDDE system as being better than your average 35mm 3-D film, but on its immense screens - sometimes eight stories high and 120 feet wide - the company claims the pictures are clearer, less distorted, and more immersive.
IMAX has 33 3-D-enabled theaters around the world, but so far has been mostly showing traditional IMAX fare: reality-based science films, only an hour long. IMAX hopes that producing animated features might change all that. The company now has a total of 150 theaters. With the recent infiltration of IMAX centers into shopping malls and urban centers - instead of their traditional homes in amusement parks and science centers - and with 80 more in the works, IMAX thinks that producing feature-style films will allow the company to compete for the Saturday-night family entertainment dollar.
"We saw the company had fantastic reliability ... but it was in this niche of docutainment," explains Wechsler. "When we talked about programming directions, we thought, what would kids and adults look for? Think of The Lion King in 3-D."
Of course, if IMAX wants to compete for mainstream family entertainment, it has to come up with the 3-D films fast - which is where the rest of Hollywood comes in. IMAX, after all, can't compete with Disney when it comes to making films; but if all works right, by helping the Pixars and Warner Bros. turn their 2-D films into 3-D IMAX features, IMAX will have a ready-made slate of branded box-office hits.
