Yesterday, I showed the poster for “Jurassic Park 3D” to my two sons, who have seen the film here at home several times, including a Film Nerd 2.0 screening that I wrote about, and when Toshi realized he was going to get to see it in a theater next summer in both IMAX and 3D, his eyes went wide.
“That’s going to scare me out of the crap!”
Indeed it will. I’m all for the sudden realization by the studios that they have these valuable assets on their shelves, these movies that could be living an ongoing theatrical life if they would just treat them like events, even if they are releasing them in slightly revised form. In this particular case, I think “Jurassic Park” is pretty much the perfect movie to use, and 3D and IMAX both sound like they could be great new ways to have fun with the film. It’s funny to see this trailer because they can use images that were never part of the original advertising for the film. If they’d shown this much in 1993, audiences would have been furious.
I remember the summer the movie came out and I remember how hyper-picky I was about which theaters in Los Angeles I would go to if seeing it. That was one of those movies that you had to go see with a group of friends, especially if some of you had seen it and some of you hadn’t and you wanted to see their faces afterwards. The sound was a huge part of the experience, and in particular, if you saw it at a theater with a great DTS set-up, you were guaranteed a stomach-rumbling experience. For my money, the best theater playing the film in Los Angeles was the old Avco on Wilshire Blvd. This was when the downstairs was still one giant auditorium, before General Cinemas mutilated the theater by cutting it in half, and every single screening of “Jurassic Park” we went to there was totally full. It was great to sit near the back and watch a wave of reactions hit the crowd during the T-rex attack, and thanks to the sound work, it felt like you were surrounded by the world of the movie.
That’s exactly the experience I want Toshi and Allen to have with it, and if that means 3D and IMAX, then great… it can only enhance it for them. The more of these re-releases that work, the more adventurous the studio’s will get with what they’re willing to put out, and I would love to see a film culture where revival releases are given just as much room and just as much attention as new releases. It would be healthy for theaters, for studios, and definitely for audiences.
We’ll see what happens when “Jurassic Park 3D” hits theaters April 5, 2013.