"George and Rick are really excited about the technology they have seen in 3-D... they showed about 10 minutes of Star Wars at a trade industry show about a year ago, and there was a lot of great buzz. Well, a couple of things have turned out. You have to look at the business plan: When does it make sense to do something like that? And you need thousands of digital screen theaters. It does not work on a film projector... This may be the thing that is finally going to force a lot of theater chains to bring in digital projectors at least for one of their screens... A lot of theater chains have announced they are going ahead. That said, how long is it going to take to get three- to four- to five thousand theaters digitally converted? It's not going to happen this year. It's not going to happen by the end of next year. In addition, the process to do the movie turns out to be a little more expensive than initially thought. So you have the theaters converting, you have the costs of converting one or all of the six Star Wars movies into 3-D, and you have the fact that the technology involves wireless battery-operated glasses that blink maybe a thousand times a second; it's not like a read and blue lens. So you have to take all those factors into consideration. I think Lucasfilm is still very interested in releasing the saga in 3-D. I think it's really just a matter of time, but I don't think it's going to be in the next couple of years."
So with theater attendance down, they're expecting movie theaters to make this huge investment in a new technology? I just don't see why they'd make the investment in this when a lot of theaters still haven't made the jump to digital. Not to mention that I can just see a lot of wireless goggles disappearing after every viewing, just like the special glasses at Disneyland disappear. I hope those glasses are cheap or have some kind of tracking technology. I don't think a theater would like to lose several pair after each viewing.