There’s a chicken-and-egg problem with 3-D movies: For them to achieve mass-market success, studios must deliver a stream of blockbusters. But if too few screens are equipped for 3-D, there’s little point in spending the extra 20 percent it costs to shoot in the format.

Furthermore, to show digital 3-D movies, theaters must install a system, typically from one of the two main suppliers, Real D and Dolby Laboratories. A 3-D system can cost $20,000 or more. What’s more, only 4,600 of the 38,000 theaters in the U.S. have digital projectors, so many owners first have to fork out $75,000 for those—making the total price close to $100,000. Theater owners don’t want to spend that much money unless they know they’ll be able to fill the house.

Another hitch is the glasses. (“They’re a little Buddy Holly, but hey, we’re all in this together!” Fraser quips.) So far, there is no standard that works with every 3-D system. Real D relies on cheap disposable or recyclable glasses, which could cost theaters or studios millions to stock. Dolby uses expensive glasses—around $40—that are supposed to be returned at the end of every screening, but people inevitably steal them. “That is the fly in the ointment,” says Thomson, whose theater chain is buying Dolby systems. “You have to get the glasses back or you lose your ass.”

You can see where this is going: Theaters don’t want to invest until Holly­wood does, and Hollywood doesn’t want to invest until theaters do. Once both invest, the industry hopes to create a positive-reinforcement cycle.

Anschutz invested in both the chicken and the egg. He funded Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D through Walden, which he controls. He also owns Regal Entertainment Group, the world’s largest movie-theater chain, with more than 6,000 screens. Regal has installed more Real D systems than any other operator. Anschutz was also connected to Real D. Joshua Greer, its president and co-founder, started developing the 3-D-projection system while he was an executive at Walden. “We didn’t want Walden to be in the business of selling a 3-D system to theaters,” Granat says. “So Josh took the project out of Walden and built Real D with knowledge from Walden.”

To recap: Anschutz stands to make money both by showing Journey in theaters and on the film itself. Plus, he had a role in the birth of technology that other theater chains are likely to buy and install. Anschutz has the chicken, the egg, and the chicken feed.

"I wish I could say the movie theater experience will never go away, but I’m not sure,” says Jonathan Kuntz, a film-history professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. It’s not just home theaters that are competing for consumers’ time. Audiences are being pulled away by other forms of entertainment too. They’re increasingly logging on to YouTube and Facebook, playing Guitar Hero and World of Warcraft, instant messaging, and blogging.

Consumers will do something that’s inconvenient to have a high-quality experience—like go to a U2 concert. And we’re willing to put up with lower quality for the sake of convenience—like listen to a U2 song on an iPod. But we’re not that interested in something that is both inconvenient and of not-so-great quality. Movie theaters are inconvenient (you have to leave the house), and the experience isn’t much better than that of a nice home theater.

Bringing in 3-D will boost the quality of the experience, but it still might not be enough to lure butts out of living rooms and into cinemas. Home theaters will soon be able to show 3-D. I visited a Kodak lab where a team is working on a 3-D display, and the images rivaled what I saw in Walden’s screening room. “It will be three years before the price and package are appropriate for consumer applications,” says Kodak researcher Patrick Cosgrove.

There’s another potential glitch in Hollywood’s 3-D scheme: Theaters are losing their appeal. “3-D doesn’t address the core problem,” says George Mason University professor Tyler Cowen, who has written extensively about the economics of entertainment. He says that people don’t go to theaters because the screen is bigger or the image is in 3-D; they go because they want to go out. Theaters have suffered to a large degree because they fail to provide their customers with great going-out experiences: They have crummy seats, sell expensive and bad food, and don’t serve alcohol. If all this is true, efforts by Malco and other chains like Landmark to introduce such amenities as couches and waiters might have more impact on the theater business than 3-D will. Maybe the money that theaters are spending on 3-D could be better used on other things.

Despite the efforts of Anschutz, Cameron, Katzenberg, and others, the greater forces at work here suggest something other than a happy ending. For Hollywood, 3-D may indeed be like Viagra—a temporary cure for a situation that will only get worse over time.