Steven Spielberg likes IMAX's Raiders of the Lost Ark conversion. He really likes it! In an interview with Yahoo!, the uber-director said that he was "dubious" when IMAX approached him about giving his 1981 action-adventure classic the 70 mm mega-screen treatment, but ended up being way more than pleasantly surprised. more »
No, really — I'm asking: "Scalpers reportedly are re-selling The Dark Knight Rises’ midnight IMAX tickets for $65-$100 apiece on both Craigslist and StubHub for NYC’s AMC Loews Lincoln Square 13 — higher even than for Avengers. Yet this may be my favorite Dark Knight Rises pre-release factoid so far: 'All the major circuits have asked for more frequent pickups from their Brink’s Truck drivers to deposit the record amount of cash they are anticipating,' a Warner Bros exec told me today." [Deadline]
With a number of The Dark Knight Rises midnight screenings sold out across the country, you might be out of luck snagging a coveted opening night ticket at certain theaters. But who's willing to pay as much as $120 for a single TDKR IMAX ticket just to be among the first to catch the Batman outing this summer? ScreenCrush reports on the recent rise in scalped offerings for Christopher Nolan's latest: "Tickets to the midnight IMAX screenings are popping up on eBay and Craigslist for over $100; at times an almost 80% markup...A few 'entrepreneurs' are even selling groups of seats for $500." Silly spending or essential expense? Sound off, Batfans. [ScreenCrush]
July 20 is the summer's most anticipated date for Bat-fans, but if you haven't yet pre-ordered for The Dark Knight Rises you might want to hop on the IMAX train and snag your ticket before too long. Why? With over an hour of footage shot with IMAX technology, Chris Nolan's trilogy-ender is set to blow minds in the larger format. And that could make the IMAX experience worthwhile.
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There's nothing more enraging to me as a moviegoer than that dreaded moment when, in the middle of a movie, the unmistakable, un-ignorable glow of a cell phone screen cuts through the glorious darkness in my field of vision and takes me out of the viewing experience. Texting, sexting, checking emails, Tweeting -- I don't care what your excuse is, it's not okay to ruin everyone else's experience by using your phone (or talking or shaking the entire row of seats with your nervous-boredom knee jiggle or letting your stank feet air out in the aisles or snoring, you selfish prick.) So why would theater owners or studio heads, whose job it is to deliver an enjoyable movie-going experience to their paying customers, ever even entertain the notion of allowing or encouraging texting in a movie theater?
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Where have you read this before? "In December, Paramount made the unconventional decision to release Ghost Protocol exclusively in IMAX theaters five days before broadening its release. The move, which Mr. Bird advocated, helped catapult the film to the No. 1 spot when it went wide the following week on the way to becoming the highest-grossing Mission Impossible installment yet. For Mr. Bird, the point is that the typical multiplex theater lacks excitement. When he was young, he says 'if you wanted to see a brand new movie, the only way was to see it perfectly projected in a really big theater with the bulb turned all the way up and an attentive projectionist.'" Adds Christopher Nolan: "These were cameras that had been to the top of Mount Everest, to the bottom of the ocean and into outer space, but people thought we couldn't make a feature film. It was absurd." [WSJ]
Before IMAX became a way to boost action sequences — Tom Cruise dangling from the tallest building in the world, the Joker's gang rappelling down from a Gotham City high-rise to rob a bank — the outsized format was primarily the domain of nature films like To the Arctic 3D, which aim to dazzle with large-scale shots of mountains and dolphins and Australia and other impressive-looking things. Forty minutes long and narrated by Meryl Streep, To the Arctic uses spoonfuls of cuteness — featuring walruses and caribou, though polar bears are its primary animal stars — to make its fairly grim environmental message go down a little easier.
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There's so much good stuff in this new DGA Quarterly interview (particularly about the joys of IMAX), but for the record, Christopher Nolan isn't messing around with his commitment to shooting on old-fashioned glorious film. And according to Nolan, his peers shouldn't be, either:
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After years of foisting dashed-off 3-D — and its inflated ticket prices — on movie audiences, studios may have found their most reliable ally yet in shoring up box office: IMAX. And not just the punch and potential of the brand's own 3-D, either, but good old conventional 2-D as well.
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A new minute-or-so-long trailer for Prometheus has landed, and while it's unclear how much of this footage will be included in Saturday's planned 2:33 minute trailer debut (which will follow 20th Century Fox's WonderCon presentation), Ridley Scott's June 8 sci-fi pic just keeps the hits coming. Sparse on dialogue, big on images, the trailer teases Prometheus's IMAX release and impresses on the startling strength of its visuals alone.
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Paul Thomas Anderson diehards have gossiped for months over reports that the filmmaker is shooting an undisclosed portion of his next film, known as The Master, on 65mm -- the IMAX film format used recently, and to great effect, by the likes of Christopher Nolan and DP Wally Pfister on The Dark Knight and Brad Bird and DP Robert Elswit on Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol. In a Twitter exchange yesterday, Pixar veterans Bird, Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich geeked out over the joys of 70mm film, dropping a bit of confirmation that Anderson is indeed shooting in the format.
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By the year 2013, IMAX theaters and Kodak will bring digital theatrical projection to the next level with a single, exciting, futuristic-sounding concept: LASERS! The companies announced their partnership today in a statement promising advances in quality projection in large-scale IMAX and dome theaters in the coming years to benefit moviegoers, theaters, and investors. Win-win-win?
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