LAST WEEKEND Beowulf, the epic poem written 1,000 years ago and dreaded by schoolchildren ever since, became an unlikely box-office smash.

Dropping old English alliterative verse for high-tech animation and Angelina Jolie, Beowulf proved an unstoppable blockbuster, pulling in $27.5m (£13.3m) in its opening weekend in America, and £2.2m in Britain. Aside from Penguin Classics, the biggest winner from Beowulf’s triumph may have been 3D cinema.

Hollywood has toyed with 3D since 1915 with varying degrees of failure. Until recently 3D has been a novelty act, inserted in a last-ditch attempt to squeeze one more film out of a dying franchise: remember Jaws 3D – The Third Dimension Is Terror?

But modern techniques have done away with the cardboard-framed red-and-green glasses, and 3D films are becoming ever more popular with Hollywood, where a number of studios and top directors have now released full-length 3D features or are working on them.

To date the company with the most experience in showing 3D films is Imax, a Canadian company with a franchise in large-format movies shown on special 80ft-high screens.

Beowulf in 3D at the BFI Imax in London took £60,000 in its opening weekend. The film was playing at 83 Imax venues in America and accounted for 13% of Beowulf’s business on just 1% of the screens.

As Hollywood struggles with the digital age, home rentals and ever-bigger TV screens, Beowulf’s 3D success may provide some clues about how they can fill tomorrow’s multiplexes.

It has been a good year for Imax, said Richard Gelfond, the company’s co-chief executive. Accounting problems took their toll on the firm last year, but this year Imax has had strong showings for big-screen blockbusters, including Transformers, Spider-man 3, Harry Potter and 300.

In order to achieve Imax’s crisp images on huge screens, films have to be converted to a special large-format film. It costs about $30,000 to make a single print of an Imax movie, compared with $1,000 for a normal film, so in order to recoup the money, the film has to have a longer run.

“It’s all about content,” said Gelfond. With big-production movies often failing at the box office, the wrong choice can be very costly. The same holds true for 3D.

“My Dinner with Andre is not going to be a great 3D property,” said Gelfond. But for the right sort of film, Imax and 3D are a big draw. “The Imax audience is almost completely incremental. It’s people who go to the theatre for a second time for a different experience.”

Most of the big Hollywood films shown on Imax have not been 3D (the last Harry Potter movie had a short 3D section at the end) but Gelfond expects more and more movies to enter the third dimension in the next few years.

Titanic director James Cameron is working on a 3D movie called Avatar. The film is being seen as a potential turning point for 3D, and Cameron seems confident that he is going to pull it off with his latest sci-fi project. He recently told the Hollywood Reporter: “We’re going to blow you to the back wall of the theatre in a way you haven’t seen for a long time.”

Cameron has been a long-time champion of 3D and believes it can save cinemas from the effects of home rentals and new technologies.

“I’m not going to make movies for people to watch on their cell phones,” he said last year. “To me, that’s an abomination.”

Jeffrey Katzenberg, chief executive of DreamWorks, has said the new developments in 3D have “the opportunity to be the most important innovation in film since the use of colour in motion pictures”.

DreamWorks has recently signed a three-picture deal with Imax for 3D animation movies Monsters vs Aliens and How to Train Your Dragon, which are both due out in 2009, and 2010’s Shrek Goes Forth.

Film heavyweights such as Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson have also become enthusiastic converts, teaming up to create a 3D trilogy based on The Adventures of Tintin.

“In 2D there are now so many ways to see a movie,” said Gelfond. Cinemas compete with DVD, pay-per-view, iPod down-loads and television, and the gap between a film’s cinematic release and its wider distribution is getting smaller, he said.

Using cinema’s advantages can help turn the tide. “300 [the animated film about 300 Spartans battling the might of the Persian empire] did $25m in Imax and $210m in America, so we had more than 10% of the box office.”

It’s a statistic he said that showed people still wanted to go to the cinema but that they were now much more demanding.

Imax will not have the field to itself, however. Its competitor Real D now has more than 1,000 3D screens, including 21 in Europe, and Dolby, a new entrant, is expanding its 3D screens across the world.

Film studios are helping to finance the roll-out of digital projectors, making 3D cheaper for cinema chains – installing an Imax system costs about $250,000. In order to increase its reach, Imax, too, is going digital and will begin rolling out its new, and cheaper, technology next year.

Last week Gelfond said Imax still had the lead in 3D. “In America we did four times the business per screen that our competitors did.” But the competition is good for business, he said. The more screens become available, “the more studios will produce content for 3D and the more people will become more aware of the attractions of 3D movies”.

The digitisation of 3D movies will also give film makers far greater flexibility in the sorts of film they can make. The old system was clunky and inflexible. The new digital 3D systems hold out the possibility of live 3D.

“I dream that we’ll be able to do live action – the World Cup in Imax 3D,” said Gelfond.

He foresees a day when people go to the cinema to see concerts, sports and current events on giant screens in 3D. It’s a role that cinema has not played since the rise of television.

“People have been writing off the movies for decades,” said Gelfond. “TV would kill the movies. Home rentals would kill the movies. It hasn’t happened. There’s no question that the nature of the game is changing but I think that with the evolution of technologies like 3D the industry will be there to meet the challenge.”

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