That’s a Big Boulder, Indy: Steven Spielberg on the IMAX Rerelease of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’

By Dave Itzkoff 上 八月 14, 2012

It's the kind of revelation that would melt the face of any die-hard Indiana Jones fan (this time, with joy): "Raiders of the Lost Ark," the 1981 adventure film that introduced that globe-trotting archaeologist, will receive a one-week Imax release next month, Lucasfilm said on Tuesday.

"For me, it's always been the bigger the screen, the better," Steven Spielberg, who directed "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and the three subsequent "Indiana Jones" sequels, said Tuesday in a telephone interview. "It's the only marked contrast we have to the generations that are seeing our movies on phones and hand-held platforms. It's a complete relief to be able to see a film that many people have just experienced on a palm-sized platform technology, suddenly hurled at that them on an Imax-sized screen."

Lucasfilm, the studio of the "Indiana Jones" executive producer George Lucas, said the Imax version of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" will receive a one-week theatrical release beginning on Sept. 7, in advance of the Blu-ray release of the Indiana Jones movies, which will go on sale Sept. 18. A list of theaters that will be showing the film can be found online at Imax.com.

Mr. Spielberg, who with the sound designer Ben Burtt supervised the conversion of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" to Imax, said that no special effects or other visual elements of the film were changed. The audio, he said, had been enhanced for surround sound: "When the boulder is rolling, chasing Indy through the cave, you really feel the boulder in your stomach, the way you do when a marching band passes by, and you're standing right next to it." Read the entire article here.