The middle class loves movies--3D or not!

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Trio of FT stories.

First one laments future of 3D in Hollywood after recent string of flops that prove only that bad films, when presented in 3D, still suck!  Avatar?  Alice?  Great flicks.  But the rest of the recent crop?  Complete crap--unsave-able by 3D, big surprise.

With roughly 2/3rds of Hollywood's take now from foreign markets, you wonder about the need to push 3D so extensively, especially given the theater costs involved and the higher ticket prices. Neither go well with an emerging global middle class, which is easier to please than that and doesn't necessarily want to shell out more money for fewer viewings.

Second story cites rising impact of India's middle class on theater-going there, as luxury cinemas (basically, a version of the modern US cinema but a big improvement over standard national fare) are going up all over India's big cities.  And even with Bollywood's immense draw there, the article says that the full force of the market is far from being felt to date.  Some chains are reporting 80% growth in attendance over the last year, as more people with more disposable income are flocking to films both native and foreign (Inception, for example, is doing very well in India).

Still, the numbers can only go up.  A blockbuster in the US will get 70m viewers out of a total population of 300m.  In India, a blockbuster gets maybe 50m out of 1.2B.  And we're talking an Indian demo that's half under 25 (or 600m in youth alone!).

Already, according to the third cite, we see Universal planning a big movie-theme park in Mumbai, one that would blend the best of Bolly and Holly.

A trend to watch.