Nash, TN No Star Wars in 3D next year, or even the next...

After talking it up at CIII & other conventions for the 30th anniversary and getting every Star Wars fan really excited about it, Lucasfilm finally decided to crunch the numbers & has realized that its not feasible right now or in the next couple of years. In the words of Obi Wan, "Good Job!"

Steve Sansweet From Comic Con:
Star Wars in 3-D
"George and Rick are really excited about the technology they have seen in 3-D... they showed about 10 minutes of Star Wars at a trade industry show about a year ago, and there was a lot of great buzz. Well, a couple of things have turned out. You have to look at the business plan: When does it make sense to do something like that? And you need thousands of digital screen theaters. It does not work on a film projector... This may be the thing that is finally going to force a lot of theater chains to bring in digital projectors at least for one of their screens... A lot of theater chains have announced they are going ahead. That said, how long is it going to take to get three- to four- to five thousand theaters digitally converted? It's not going to happen this year. It's not going to happen by the end of next year. In addition, the process to do the movie turns out to be a little more expensive than initially thought. So you have the theaters converting, you have the costs of converting one or all of the six Star Wars movies into 3-D, and you have the fact that the technology involves wireless battery-operated glasses that blink maybe a thousand times a second; it's not like a read and blue lens. So you have to take all those factors into consideration. I think Lucasfilm is still very interested in releasing the saga in 3-D. I think it's really just a matter of time, but I don't think it's going to be in the next couple of years."

Maybe we can expect it for the 35th anniversary. I won't hold my breath (because I would pass out)

 

And who knows how many times it may be delayed once they start.

The deadline for Episode I got pushed back several times...at least what was expected by the lay-public. Then again, II and III were out as expected, so maybe in a few year...

I would imagine there is plenty of components with all the CGI alone to make about 65% of the movie 3D.