This stuff gives Hollywood agita. Publicity campaigns and the buzz from theatrical releases are what drive DVD sales and premium-cable-channel showings, not to mention ancillary moneymakers like toys, videogames, and Happy Meal tie-ins. “We make films for the theater and want to exhibit there first,” says Chuck Viane, president of movie distribution for Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. “It’s the engine that pulls the train.”

Hollywood hopes that 3-D can stoke that wheezing engine. Katzenberg is making the next Shrek in 3-D, and Pixar Animation Studios is rendering the first two Toy Story movies, as well as making the next one, in 3-D. Director James Cameron (Titanic) just finished shooting Avatar, a 3-D movie planned for 2009. Peter Jackson, who directed the Lord of the Rings films, is bringing the comic-book character Tintin to the screen in a 3-D movie. Director Robert Zemeckis (Beowulf, Forrest Gump) is already filming his adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in 3-D. Every major studio has leaped aboard.

When anyone questions whether such faith in 3-D is justified, Hollywood puts forth Exhibit A: Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour. The Disney 3-D concert film shattered records for a limited release by grossing almost $45,000 a screen when it was released early this year; it made more than $30 million during its opening weekend.

But Disney can’t be sure whether Hannah killed because it was in 3-D. According to Viane, relatively few theaters could show digital 3-D when the movie came out, which meant that it played on only 683 screens. “If we had done it in 2-D and opened on thousands of screens, would we have made more money? Hard to say,” he says. “More screens typically mean more gross.” Malco’s Thomson is more direct: “Hannah would’ve been huge, in 3-D or not.”

Creating a 3-D movie today is unlike making one in any other era. New software allows studios to render computer-animated films like Shrek in 3-D. And while shooting live action in 3-D was virtually impossible just a few years ago, technology developed by Vince Pace, who previously specialized in underwater cameras and worked with Cameron on Titanic, has made it feasible. (Cameron even helped develop some of Pace’s technology.) Dual-lens cameras mimic the way eyes capture an image from slightly different angles. Computers then digitize the images, allowing directors to manipulate them. This technology has become workable only in the past few years, and it's quickly getting better and cheaper.

When images captured by Pace cameras are projected onto a screen, the overlapping images look slightly blurry to the naked eye. But when a viewer puts on special high-tech glasses that direct one image into each eye, the brain unites the two pictures, creating a single 3-D image.

In a screening room at Walden headquarters, I watch Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D wearing giant glasses that look like something you’d see on a 90-year-old man in Sarasota, Florida. The 3-D is compelling and easy to watch. Later, I talk to Brendan Fraser, Journey’s star and executive producer. “I’m very enthusiastic,” he says. “This picture is the tippity-­top of the spear of what’s coming. I want to be an old guy and say I was on the tip of that pointy spear and helped drive 3-D forward.” When I suggest that he might someday be known as the Al Jolson of 3-D, Fraser guffaws and asks if he can use that line in interviews.

But whether Fraser gets to be the Jolson of digital 3-D depends on whether 3-D spreads the way talkies did in the late 1920s. This is where reclusive billionaire Philip Anschutz enters the scene, trying to save the day.