D-Rollout For 3,000 Screens Starts This Year?
Reporter: Studios & Technicolor
Hatching D-Plans For U.S. Cinemas
Three of Hollywood’s most prolific film distributors – Disney, Warner Bros. and Sony – have signed a deal involving “big-d” digital projection deployment and “third-party” financing, according to an April story in The Hollywood Reporter.

The deal allows Technicolor to approach other studios, “chief among them Universal Pictures and 20th Century Fox,” according to the trade paper.

An initial U.S. installation in “3,000 theaters,” according to one Reporter source, could begin deploying as early as the end of this year. The paper also said the installations would be compliant with the nearly-finalized technical specifications approved by studio-backed Digital Cinema Initiative over the last three years.

According to another Reporter source said to be familiar with the deal, a 3,000-screen rollout would cost about $200 million, and be implemented with a combination of equity financing from the participating studios and debt financing from banks. The paper said a “studio source” confirmed that each distributor is contributing “significant” monies to an initial rollout.

Though studio-endorsed (or “big-d”) feature-film digital cinema projection systems made their commercial debut with 1999’s “Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace,” fewer that 100 (or about one quarter of one percent) of the nation’s approximately 36,600 public auditoria are currently equipped with the celluloid-free equipment – equipment that, if implemented on a greater scale, could potentially save the studios billions of dollars in celluloid print and shipping costs.

Cinema owners widely anticipate than any realistic studio-backed big-d business plan will employ significant subsidies – subsidies that would cover all or most of the expense of installing big-d equipment in the nation’s projection booths. Big-d projection systems are three to five times more expensive that the celluloid projectors most exhibitors currently employ.

The Technicolor plan is expected to be presented to the exhibition community and the Department of Justice’s antitrust division in the coming months, according to the paper, which also notes the Technicolor deal does not preclude distributors from entertaining other financing plans.