Received this email from Time today:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article1596962.ece
From The Sunday Times
April 1, 2007
Sit well back: this is a 3-D invasion John Harlow, Los Angeles
As if the newly knighted Bono were not already larger than life, the U2 singer is poised to become the first rock star to leap out of the silver screen as Hollywood prepares to unleash a flood of 3-D movies.
U2 in 3-D, which features the band’s last world tour, is so vivid that cinema-managers who saw unedited footage at a trade show said they had ducked when Bono appeared to swing his microphone into their midst while singing Sunday Bloody Sunday.
Once dismissed as a headache-inducing gimmick, three-dimensional films are about to return in force, starting this weekend as Disney releases Meet the Robinsons in 700 cinemas across America.
Critics have not been kind to the animated children’s adventure, but many have praised its technical innovations as fresh and easy on the eye, and some have suggested that it is the shape of films to come.
Filmgoers will still need to wear 3-D glasses but they will be padded, fashionable-looking and a world away from the cardboard spectacles popular during the “three-dee” craze of the 1950s.
In the past three years a sprinkling of experimental 3-D films, such as a revamped version of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, have proved popular, encouraging cinema chains to invest in 3-D screens and projectors.
Studios have tested the waters with “conversions” where parts of a film have been turned into 3-D after shooting and shown in specially equipped cinemas.
Last summer fans flocked to Imax cinemas showing Superman Returns with 20 minutes converted into 3-D. “When Clark Kent takes off his glasses, you put on yours,” director Bryan Singer urged audiences.
This summer Spider-Man 3 and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix are to be shown in giant 3-D Imax screens around the world.
“I did not believe 3-D would be as big as it’s becoming now,” said John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theatre Owners, after the U2 film was shown last month at the association’s annual conference. “It’s blowing the socks off our members so it’s really going to thrill the audiences.”
The U2 film, shot with up to nine double-lensed cameras, will be released this autumn when the number of American high street cinemas capable of showing 3-D films is expected to have doubled, reaching people who do not live near an Imax screen.
Arriving in cinemas about the same time will be Beowulf, with the British actor Ray Winstone as the legendary hero, Angelina Jolie as the monster Grendel’s mother, and a range of eye-popping effects such as flying limbs and fire erupting from the screen.
That will be followed by Journey 3-D, a new version of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth with Brendan Fraser from The Mummy series as an explorer lost deep underground.
Hollywood is not alone. The Chinese government is encouraging its film-makers to develop 3-D films, although their first attempt, a pricey adventure called Thru the Moebius Strip, flopped at the box office. Bollywood studios are working on a family epic called Magik where Hindu dancers “leap into the laps of the audience”.
New cameras have been developed by the director James Cameron, a technology evangelist whose 2009 movie Avatar — a science fiction epic showing men and aliens battling it out on a far-away planet — is regarded as make or break for the 3-D genre.
Cameron, whose earlier films The Abyss and The Terminator introduced computer-generated characters to Hollywood, said: “I have been waiting for a decade for this technology to come along, and in the end I had to develop the cameras myself.
“We are going to blow you to the back wall of the theatre in a way you haven’t felt for a long time. My goal is to rekindle those amazing moments my generation felt when we first saw 2001: A Space Odyssey or the next generation saw Star Wars. We want to get everyone off the sofa and back into the cinema.”
Steven Spielberg and George Lucas have hinted that they are working on a 3-D technology where a thicker cinema screen replaces the glasses.
Spielberg, whose DreamWorks Animation studio will be releasing all future films in both 2-D and 3-D versions, said recently that this was just the beginning.
“Some day in the not too distant future you’ll be able to go to a movie and it will all be happening around you, over your head, under your seat,” he said. “We are going to produce imagery that will once again take you on a mind-blowing journey. That’s what movies are all about.”
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I can't wait..
actually gave it 3 out of 4 stars.
The industry is moving forward. 
how will that go?
A MILLION THANK YOUS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
