Jeffrey Katzenberg Furious, Contradictory Over Titans' 3-D Screen-Hogging

When your salary is $1 per year, it can be hard to buy a break. Ask Jeffrey Katzenberg, the DreamWorks Animation boss hoping to rebound from last spring's relatively moribund Monsters Vs. Aliens property with next month's How to Train Your Dragon. Everything looked great, with his family film ready to go up against Clash of the Titans in a nice bit of counterprogramming. And then, as fate (and Hollywood) would have it, Warner Bros. yanked the rug -- and, more literally, a few thousand 3-D screens -- out from under him by making Titans 3-D. Katzenberg's fury is making the rounds today, but as the Prophet of the 3-D Revolution, shouldn't he have seen this coming? Moreover, didn't he just ask for this last fall?

After all, it was less than five months ago, in a keynote speech at Variety's 3-D Entertainment Summit, that Katzenberg inveighed about the necessity of both exhibitors and studios to get with the 3-D program. "I find it amazingly curious how slow the live-action business has been at jumping on this opportunity," he said, adding that it "dampened [his] credibility" to jump the gun in foretelling a day when all content would be 3-D.

Of course, now that Warners has taken Katzenberg at his visionary word by converting its blockbuster Titans -- thus moving the film's release date back a week to April 2 and encroaching on Dragon's precious 3-D screens -- Katzenberg has reportedly e-mailed a grievance to WB chief Barry Meyer and "at least one other top Warner executive." One the one hand, Katzenberg has a legitimate beef: 3-D dates are generally spread out enough for the newest release to claim the majority of the 3,500 3-D screens in the U.S. You can't (or shouldn't, anyway) just drop a 3-D project on the market with two months' warning. Furthermore, anticipating a problem like this one, Katzenberg has been asking exhibitors to convert screens for years. But even as they watched 3-D grosses boom, tight-fisted, short-sighted theater chains refused to pay for it. Which puts us where we are today: Around $700 million has since been raised by investors hoping to get in on the market, but studios' desperate pursuits for new revenue outpace the actual conversion of theaters. That's not Katzenberg's fault.

On the other hand, Katzenberg protests too much. If he really believed his own hype about 3-D -- and knew just what kind of screen shortfall awaited his company by 2010 -- then why re-up last year with a compensation package so dependent on the blockbuster success of DWA films? Why gamble so heavily (requiring 72% and 95% revenue increases in the next two years before he makes a dime) on a platform you know is soon going to be spread too thin to achieve those goals?

And finally, why take that miscalculation out on your competition? Impolitic date-shifting aside, obviously Warners would want to get in on the action. (It's not even like Avatar or the March 5-opening Alice in Wonderland will be out of theaters yet, either.) That's just business. Did Katzenberg get equally torqued to have Megamind going up against 3-D Harry Potter this November? So confused.

Anyway, this is a mess, but one that Katzenberg was supposed to be prophetic (and well-paid) enough to see coming a mile away. I may be able to second-guess from the comfort of the present, but mostly I just wish I didn't think we'll have this conversation all over again in a matter of months.

· Katzenberg angry over Warner's Clash of the Titans 3-D release [LAT]