The 3-D animated movie "Monsters vs. Aliens" just released in China on more than 200 screens - all 3-D equipped, making it practically impossible to pirate the film with a video recorder. According to DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg about 90 per cent of piracy today occurs when people bring a camcorder into a screening and they shoot it - and that "won’t work with 3D."

Promoting the film and 3-D technology at the recent Hong Kong International Film Festival, Katzenberg said China is a unique market for the movie. "China is the only market in the world where it will be shown 100% in 3-D," Katzenberg said, adding that after successes across the region with the animated films "Kung Fu Panda" and "Madagascar," Asia is increasingly important to DreamWorks. "Our growth here has been explosive," Katzenberg said, saying that he’d doubled his travel to Asia, going there eight times during the past 12 months.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, ticket sales rose 27% in China in 2008 but the country still has far fewer screens per capita than most developed nations. Katzenberg dismissed the notion that cost-conscious Chinese moviegoers will not pay a premium for 3-D movie tickets. "Moviegoers in China today are much more diverse than they were three years ago," he said, adding that there are about 2,000 3-D capable theaters in the U.S. and another 1,500 outside America, with about 200 in mainland China, several hundred in the UK and another 100 in France. Katzenberg said he expects those numbers to "multiply several times" in the next year or two because the new technology is significantly better than the previous generation of 3-D.

Lim Han Seng, regional director of sales and marketing for distributor United International Pictures Asia, said that "Monsters" will play on about 180 screens in China, mostly in Beijing and Shanghai. Speculation has it that the current limits to the number of films allowed to screen on a revenue-sharing basis are being relaxed with 3-D programs.

So what about increased security? Indeed, a 3D film produced using cross-polarization or shuttered images will result in an unusable copy made with a conventional video camera, and this could lower piracy. But technological thieves can be infuriatingly devious - and I can think of a few ways that a pirated copy could be made, although the difficulty may preclude all but the most clever attempts. Either way, the format will probably not make much of a dent in changing the effects of piracy.

3D will have to sink or swim on its own merits, and that means good content and scripts, together with support from the business and financial communities. Film critic Leonard Maltin says that the studios’ current expectations about 3-D "are an absolute replica of the pronouncements and interviews that came out in 1953." (Hollywood, of course, pushed 3D then and again later, in part to stave off competition from TV. We know what happened.)

Somehow, it feels different this time. DreamWorks recently announced that every new movie it makes will be shot in 3-D. The technology works, and passes muster for audiences, and those are critical prerequisites for a viable product. But whichever way it goes, there’s no doubt that both 2D and 3D will co-exist-perhaps indefinitely. -agc