Comin' at ya: 10,000 more 3-D-ready movie screens

Dying to catch the latest 3-D movies in a theater near you? Well, hold onto your seat—about 10,000 more screens will be making audiences duck within the next three years.

CNN is reporting that four of the big Hollywood movie studies (including Disney, Fox, Paramount, and Universal) have struck a deal with Access Integrated Technologies, a tech firm that specializes in digital upgrades for movie theaters, that would bring 3-D capabilities to more than 10,000 U.S. movie screens by 2011.

The three-year 3-D conversion process will cost more than $700 million, CNN reports, or about $75,000 per screen. For now, only about a thousand North American movie screens can handle 3-D movies, and that's causing something of a bottleneck, according to CNN.

Take, for instance, the case of "Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert." Now, Hannah Montana might not be your cup of tea, but a hoard of tweens rushed movie theaters to see their heroine in 3-D, ringing up $31.3 million in ticket sales.

That may have been great for Miley Cyrus, but Bono fans were probably bummed that the recent U2 3-D concert movie had its run cut short by the blockbuster Hannah Montana flick, which was monopolizing 3-D-ready screens thanks to the crush of kids.

I can see why the big movie studios are willing to make such an investment in 3-D technology—after all, those of us with big, sweet-looking HDTVs and on-demand, downloadable movies are finding fewer and fewer reasons to go to an actual theater. And frankly, I've had it with people chattering away and checking their voice mail in the middle of a movie.

But 3-D movies, and good ones, at that—for example, James Cameron's Avatar, slated for 2009—could coax me back to a theater. Of course, you may end up paying about $3 more for the 3-D experience (or about a buck per dimension, I guess).

What about you: Would you get off the couch to see a blockbuster in 3-D? Any thoughts from those of you who've seen the latest 3-D movies? (I haven't been myself, yet—sorry, but Hannah Montana and "Beowulf" just weren't doing it for me.)

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Deal could bring 3-D movies to 10,000 screens [CNN]