SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - Getting people to go to the movies – an increasingly difficult feat – will hopefully get easier once Bryan Pearson installs two new digital projectors, one of which will be capable of playing 3D movies, says Pearson, owner Nunavut's only movie theatre, The Astro in Iqaluit.

Bryan Pearson, owner of The Astro in Iqaluit, says his movie house will be equipped with digital projectors capable of playing 3D movies in the next two weeks. The switch will render obsolete the shipping of multiple film reels up north, which has always constituted the largest cost for Pearson. - Guy Quenneville/NNSL photo

The glut of satellite dishes offering Video-on-Demand – not to mention the fact there's a lot more to do in Iqaluit compared to 1996, when Pearson opened the theatre – often makes it a struggle for Pearson to keep The Astro going.

That's not even mentioning the $7,000-a-month rent, or the discounted ticket prices ($12 per adult, $10 for the kiddies) that don't reflect the approximately $40,000 yearly cost of having multiple heavy film cans shipped by air from Montreal, every week.

"It's a struggle," says the 76-year-old Pearson, whose two auditoriums seat a total of 200 people.

But 3D – which became all the rage in North America following the December 2009 premiere of James Cameron's Avatar – stands to tip the scale in Pearson's favour, he believes.

"I hope it increases business. I suspect it will," says Pearson. "I think 3D will be a complementary (feature) to the business because it's not (widely) available. A lot people in Iqaluit have never been down south or never seen or experienced real 3D."

From a logistical point of view, the digital projectors – which Pearson hopes to install within the next two weeks – are a godsend.

Pearson curses the big, noisy projectors and platter systems currently used to play his films, but it's the costly system of shipping films in cans that puts the biggest dent in his operation.

With digital projectors, films are mailed in the form of small hard drives, saving Pearson a considerable amount of money on shipping.

In addition, going digital means Pearson can screen live Saturday performances of the Metropolitan Opera via satellite, as well as plan Arctic-themed film festivals.

Foreign films, not so much.

"We've had marvellous films with subtitles and the comments were something like, 'I didn't come here to read, Pearson, for Christ's sake!'"

Whether Iqaluit embraces the new digital format and 3D remains to be seen. For one thing, Pearson says he is considering charging a premium for 3D movies – $15.

And people just don't prize the big-screen experience anymore, despite how much work Pearson has put into his sound system, he says. (The Astro's greatest asset is a six-by-four foot subwoofer designed specifically for the release of the 1970s disaster movie Earthquake. If you stand in the back of the theatre, you can feel the air from the speaker hitting you in the face, says Pearson.)

"It's only exciting as far as people are going to support it," he says of 3D. "I mean, people are very blasé about this theatre."

Then there's the declining 3-D revenue stream post-Avatar, blamed primarily on shoddy 3D work on movies originally filmed in 2D.

"People are fussy bloody bastards anyway, at the best of times," says the famously colourful Pearson. "But yeah, I've heard that, but I think that because it will be so unique here, it will do well."

The digital projectors come at a cost of $250,000. The Government of Nunavut has given Pearson a $100,000 grant to help with the purchase.

"It's possible solely due to the fact that the Government of Nunavut kindly gave us a grant," he says of the new projectors.

We welcome your opinions. Click here to e-mail a letter to the editor.