Every morning over the past year or so the actor Keanu Reeves has apparently lit a small ritual fire to ward off evil spirits. And well he might, because the two Matrix films he has been working on, the most long-awaited sequels in recent Hollywood history, are supposedly jinxed, with a curse that has claimed lives and put its stars in hospital.
With so much money at stake you would think that Warner Bros would not want to take too many risks. But The Matrix Reloaded, the second of the $363m (£228m) trilogy, will open on giant Imax screens only a few days after it is released in multiplexes next month.
The decision by the studio which invented the talkies to take a chance on the new technology is being hailed as one of the biggest revolutions in filmgoing since CinemaScope, and ushers in an era when blockbusters will be premiered on Imax and conventional screens simultaneously. The third instalment, The Matrix Revolutions, will be released in the large-screen format on the same day as it opens in conventional cinemas in November.
With its eye-popping special effects and clever use of religious symbolism, The Matrix, directed by the reclusive Wachowski brothers, rewrote the rulebook for futuristic thrillers when it hit cinemas four years ago.
A breakthrough in remastering technology now allows all 35mm films, no matter how complex, to be adapted to be shown on Imax's seven-storey-high wraparound screens. At around $3m (£1.9m) a film, the process is relatively cheap by Hollywood standards. But purists insist these prints cannot truly compete with the quality of films shot with the large-format cameras by pioneers such as Disney, which shot the animated Fantasia 2000 in the Imax format.
Even so, directors including George Lucas and Ron Howard were impressed enough to allow their films to be adapted. Imax cuts of Stars Wars: Attack of the Clones and Apollo 13 were hits in the US, though the adapted films are often very different to the originals. Apollo 13 lost nearly a fifth of its length, and Attack of the Clones was also trimmed, apparently because Imax projection systems cannot handle films longer than two hours.
Despite Warner Bros' decision to risk their second hottest property (after Harry Potter) on the technology, it could be the late summer before audiences at the nine British Imax cinemas see the next episode of The Matrix series.
Many are booked up until then and distributors may wait to see how the Imax version does in the US before ordering prints. But Alison Rodin, who devises the programmes for the two London Imax cinemas, predicted that whenever it arrived it would change how Imax cinemas are seen.
"The Matrix will bring in a whole new generation of teenagers and twentysomethings who have never been to a large-format film before," she said. "There is a whole different grammar to large-format films, so it will be very interesting to see how the pace and the cutting transfers."
She added: "Research has shown that audiences will pay up to 25% more to see a film on the big screen."
Although more features are being made with large-format cameras, most have been documentaries on mountaineering or similar subjects. Ironically, one reason why the Imax versions of the Matrix films may be delayed in arriving on these shores is the success of James Cameron's 3D documentary Ghosts of the Abyss.
