About 40% of advance ticket sales for “Avatar” are for the IMAX version, according to an IMAX spokesman based on Fandando reports.
That sounds impressive enough, but even moreso when you know that the 179 IMAX screens playing “Avatar” in 3D (260 globally) represent less than 3% of the roughly 8,000 screens on which the movie will be shown overall.
But that should not be a surprise to people following the enormous rise in 3D this year. Ticket sales for 3D versions of movies have already grown 425% from $307 million last year to $1.3 billion this year, according to Daily Variety. And that’s before “Avatar” opens this weekend in more 3D theaters than any movie in history – about 2,100 in the U.S. alone.
It’s not hard to directly credit 3D for the overall box-office surge this year to most likely surpass $10 billion for the first time ever. Summer attendance was down 2.39% compared to last year but premiums of $2 to $3 on every 3D ticket and even higher premiums at IMAX 3D presentations pushed revenue up 1.3 percent, according to Screen Digest.
Among the 3D hits this year are Disney’s “Up,” “A Christmas Carol,” and “G-Force,” DreamWorks’ “Monsters vs. Aliens,” Fox’s “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaur,” and Sony’s “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.”