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Movie Theaters Aim for Live 3D Sports
teutonic_leech writes "ZDNet has an article claiming that movie theater operators plan to be screening live 3D sports events by 2007 in a bid to lure sports fans away from their home theater systems and bolster sagging mid-week ticket sales." From the article: "Other chains are looking to much-improved digital three-dimensional projection for an experience theatergoers can't get at home. But while the projection has greatly advanced from the early 3D days, special glasses must still be worn to achieve the full effect."
So they are actually going to be selling beer in the movie theater for sports?
The cinemas brought in vendors to stroll the aisles with hot dogs, peanuts and beer
Will the prices be the same as at the ball park?
If so, I would reckon that it won't be a big hit. The main reason I do not go to the movies is the price, and not just of the tickets. I would pay $8 or so a ticket if I could get a 42oz Coke for under $2 or so.
Who needs 3D glasses when I have my beer goggles !!
Let the commencement BEGINULATE!
i can imagine watching ice capades this way (dark room, stadium seating) but not competitive sports.
how are you supposed to watch sport in a movie theatre? are you supposed to be loud? order drinks? heckle the other fans? get up to the bathroom, step on someone's toes and block their view? it seems very awkward, formal, and not very relaxing.
The appeal to watch a sports game on a huge screen is very appealing.
The appeal to watch sports in 3d is nonexistant.
When people get together to watch a game they are always cheering booing, having fun, being noisy.. This is what you would find at a sports bar where it is acceptable.
I can't imagine this going over very well inside a theater where you are confined to your small seat.. the atmosphere is a lot different and I can see a lot of people getting annoyed at other people for being loud.
I've got 1 word
PORN
It built the net
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Kif: The Holoshed's on the fritz again -- the characters turned real!
Zapp: Damn! The last time that happened, I got slapped with three paternity suits!
...when Janet Jackson's boob flopped out at the Superbowl?
Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.
...at a cinema in St Kilda (Melbourne) at 4am with 400-500 other people. The atmosphere was absolutely fantastic. People were standing up, cheering, waving flags (no firecrackers or flares, at least). I'd definitely do it again. In fact, I did. I organised about six games to be shown live in the University cinema where I was working. Even though it wasn't brilliantly advertised, the cinema was pretty much full each time and people really enjoyed the group atmosphere and got into the swing of it.
Trust me, a sports telecast in a cinema is very different from seeing a normal film, at which people are expected to be quiet (unless it's a 1950s b-grade, I suppose). It's a lot more like being at a stadium than watching a television.
If I could go to a cinema on a Sunday night and see a live Formula One race (no waiting around for a delayed telecast), I'd be there every race.
I heard that your library burnt down and destroyed your only two books - and one was not even coloured in yet.
They've got the 3d part right but it's not 20th century sports we want to watch. It's 21st century video games. I would seriously love to go watch Counterstrike or Doom3 in a theater in 3d. The games don't have to be played live but if they wanted to go the extra mile, there's a lot of potential. For example, supply wireless controllers, create games that use them cleverly and the theater could turn into an amazing 3d interactive environment.
A company I was contracting for flew me down to L.A. two summers ago to pick the minds of Hollywood 3-D talent before engaging in the production of a complex 3-D corporate production up here in Canada.
(The experts I talked to were mostly Canadians themselves. L.A. seems to have more Canadians than Canada.)
At any rate, that's when I heard all about James Cameron's new manga-derived massively budgeted 3-D feature ("Battle Angel", if memory serves), George Lucas' plans to 3-D invigoroate all six of his Star Wars picturers, and learned that Fox has been recording Superbowls and other big, big sporting events in 3-D for a couple of years now, in order to create a library of games for 3-D viewing.
The company I consulted had even developed a high-definition 3-D Steadicam-like unit, and I got to see the test footage they'd shot at a recent football match. The cameraman could literally wander right into the field, with somebody tapping his shoulder whenever he needed to get out of the way of play.
To repeat a 3-D cliche, IT WAS LIKE YOU WERE ACTUALLY THERE, ON THE FIELD.
I have no interest in sports but it was obvious that someone who was into sports would definitely think it was the coolest thing they'd ever seen.
I am from a small, grease-loving country in the north called Ca-na-da.
well. With sports isn't that the idea? It is truly awesome, you see everybody reaching from their seats to grab items that appear right in front of their eyes, but when the motion gets to fast then it gets blurry. It happens even at their newest 3D movie Mickey's PhilharMagic. All the parks have a 3D movie and I enjoy seeing them over and over because the effects are so awesome and the air conditioning is great!
I thought they needed special theaters to show these movies but the family just saw Chicken Little in 3D at a regular theater. It is impressive. The glasses are just polarized lenses at 90 degree offset.
I don't know if this is the system they are talking about here, but Disney is typically on the cutting edge of this stuff and they have been doing 3D for years. Kodak sponsors the exhibits.
Gizmos Gagets For Ninjas
Theaters should deal with the real problem. Which is that the film distributors, and film is what the theaters do, demand 90% of their box office receipts for the first two-three weeks of any new movie that shows in the theater. With this type of arrangement, there is no way in hell that any theater can make any money from showing films. Which, as mentioned eariler, is what they do. So there is all this desperate nonsense, er... explorations into alternative revenue sources like 3D sports and digital film image projection.
Problem is, these other things aren't revenue generators. Au Contraire, they are revenue burners because the theaters have to absorb the costs of this new presentation technology without any assurances that the public will be willing to pay more for film and video services that they already get from their 'home theaters'. In fact it is unlikely that the people who put up many thousands of dollars for 'home theaters' (which are just big screen televisions and loud stereos) can be brought back into the theaters by anything that the theaters offer because the people who bought the 'home theaters' don't have any money left.
So that just leaves the people who used to go to movies but don't anymore. And usually why they don't is because the films are either too expensive or too stupid. And the reason that the films are too expensive is because Hollywood has lost the ability to make high-quality reasonably priced entertainment products.
We are at the end of Hollywood cycle now; this one has been the 'BlockBuster' era that started in 1977 with the original Star Wars movie. So there is going to be a period of contraction in the industry and the same time that there will be bursts of huge amounts of money thrown at projects of truly dubious artistic and commercial merit. Huge projects with no realistic expectation generating any real profit [stuff like Peter Jackson's King Kong, Disney's Treasure Planet, and Oliver Stone's Alexander] will continue to pop out of Hollywood as the industry goes into its final crash-and-burn cycle.
This has all happened before. The most recent Hollywood down cycle started in the mid-1950s and lasted until the mid 1970s. The defining bomb movie of that era was Cleopatra(1964) staring Elizabeth Taylor, who was the Lindsay Lohan of the 1950's. Cleopatra cost about $500-$600 million in today's equivalent dollars and brought in about 1/10th of its cost in box office. Check it out on DVD or VHS if you want to get an idea of what kind of projects are being currently planned in Hollywood for the 2007-2009 season.
Anyway, the theaters are the only people who can stop the Hollywood descent in madness by demanding a much better return schedule on box office receipts and forcing Hollywood into developing higher quality, less-expensive product.
But the theaters are unlikely to take this opportunity because they are run by mediocre, narrow-minded, business and marketing majors who would be challenged should they ever have be called to operate anything as complex as a K-Mart Men's department. You know these guys; they're the ones with the white shirts, bad haircuts, and vaguely worried looks on their faces that you see when you stop at McDonald's for a MuffinBurger before going to work in the morning. These guys are not going to be generating solutions to Hollywood's basic problems.