Journey to the Center of the Earth - 3-D or Not 3-D

There is absolutely no way you should see Journey to the Center of the Earth in a 2-D theater. You can tell by the quality of the 2-D trailers you see, and that Brendan Fraser and company seem to be running in place instead of running from dinosaurs. You’re going to need to see a T-rex stomping right out at you to sell that shot, or you’re going to be disappointed.

However, the film’s prospects don’t look that good, because the adaptation of 3-D technology is slow going. There are only 1400 3-D movie screens in the world, 1100 of them in the United States and Canada. Thanks to location issues, Journey will play on about 950 of them, which is hundreds lower than New Line had hoped for. Then there’s the fact that you can’t play 3-D movies if you don’t have digital projection in the first place, and while that’s gone over well in Asia, in Europe they’ve only got 126 screens set up for 3-D, thanks to the prohibitive cost of adapting to the technology. This isn’t going to be good for worldwide numbers.

Yet there are a dozen 3-D movies in the pipeline for 2009, so the tide should turn on this front soon. Just not soon enough for Journey to the Center of the Earth to make good numbers.