Attack Of The Digital Movie

Darth Aussie

Australian Sith Lord
NEW YORK - It's not as if it's going to take much promotion to guarantee a huge box-office turnout for the May 16 release of Attack Of The Clones, the fifth film in the hugely successful Star Wars series. But Lucasfilm is pushing anyway, to make sure you see George Lucas' vision as intended: in digital format. Fans won't be hard to sell; movie theaters are a different matter.

Lucas, however, has a reputation of pushing a change-resistant film industry in directions it didn't want to go. The original Star Wars film released in 1977 stunned the Hollywood establishment for its brash reliance on special effects, many of which had to be invented by Industrial Light and Magic, the company Lucas started in 1975 to make the film. In later years, Lucas would break through even more barriers by pushing for digital sound systems in theaters, and then using computers to edit films.

Now Lucas and his second in command, producer Rick McCallum, have taken a stand, spending an extra $100 million to record Clones not to conventional film but to digital video. When all the finishing touches are complete, the master copy of the movie will reside not as a film negative but as a computer file, several terabytes in size (exactly how many terabytes, no one yet knows). And the best way to see it will be on one of some 50 cinemas around the country and 30 more around the world equipped with digital projectors. That's far short of the 1,000 digital screens they had hoped for by now.

"We're going to use all our marketing skills to differentiate between them, and to point people toward digital theaters in their area," McCallum says. "Digital is the way we would like you to see this film."


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Forbes.com
 
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