Plastic 3D Glasses Are Helping Keep Movie Revenues Up; Can It Last?

Ice Age: Dawn Of The Dinosaurs was only one of the 3D movies that made a splash this summer. (Twentieth Century Fox)

by Linda Holmes

Now that we're through the Labor Day weekend and the cinematic summer is truly over, the numbers are being crunched on just how good of a summer it was.

Analysis of the summertime data takes place in the context of the very strong first quarter of 2009, which broke some records and made it look like movies might be the recipients of all the recession-fueled escapism money many people believed would wind up going somewhere.

How did the summer go?

What 3D has meant to summer box office, after the jump...

That depends on how you measure it. In terms of attendance, it dropped a little from last year -- between one and two percent, not enough to suggest that people are abandoning movies in huge numbers, but not what anybody hoped for after the start we saw in January and February.

But if you go by revenue, it was a record-setting summer. The take was $4.3 billion, up from last year's $4.13 billion. How are revenues up if attendance is down? Increased ticket prices -- specifically, in this case, the premiums that people paid to see the movies released this summer in 3D.

The question, of course, is whether the business model they're using for 3D releases is stable. It would be one thing if you were paying over and over again for the privilege of wearing the paper fold-up glasses with the red and blue plastic-wrap lenses -- you probably couldn't keep those indefinitely anyway.

But the plastic glasses most of these movies use now are perfectly well durable enough to be worn at movie after movie, and it may be that patience is going to grow short for repeatedly doing what feels a lot like paying to purchase the same thing over and over, even if you still have the ones you bought last time.

When I went to a 3D movie this summer and realized I already had a pair of exactly the same 3D glasses in my bag, it occurred to me that someone is eventually going to settle on a model that gives a discount if you already have a pair. Yes, not all the surcharge goes to the glasses, but it's hard not to feel like you could pay a smaller surcharge if they wouldn't force you to cover the costs of new ones if you already have old ones.

More broadly, though, the question is whether, over the long haul, when the novelty has worn off, people will continue to pay several dollars more for a 3D movie. Right now, they still do. As we discussed back at the beginning of the summer, however, we're still in the early stages of all this. Some rundowns of the situation suggest that the biggest problem 3D faces is simply a lack of available screens, so perhaps there's pent-up demand that hasn't even been tapped. But speaking for myself, ponying up for another pair of plastic glasses gets more frustrating, not less, as more of these films are made.