Angelina Jolie is Grendel’s seductive mother in the dark, ambitious and grandly scaled Beowulf. Director Robert Zemeckis made a whole new set of demands on the proprietary 3-D motion-capture process that Sony calls Imagemotion.

Paramount Pictures

In 1953, 3-D movies exploded onto the nation’s movie screens. With titles like It Came From Outer Space, Robot Monster and House of Wax, 3-D movies were supposed to rescue Hollywood from the encroaching scourge that was television.

Yet by 1955, 3-D movies were essentially dead in the water.

Rob Engle, senior stereographer and digital effects supervisor for Sony Pictures Imageworks, the studio’s visual-effects arm, says, “1953 was the heyday of 3-D, but most people don’t realize that it was only a year that 3-D lasted. A few great movies came out of that, but most of what we remember was pretty terrible.”

But 3-D is on the march anew, with two films currently in theaters and more promised — featuring directors and producers such as Steven Spielberg, Jim Cameron and Robert Zemeckis, who collaborated with Imageworks on last year’s 3-D version of Beowulf.

And, with more screens capable of showing 3-D movies as well as technological advances that will erase the headaches suffered by audiences wearing cheesy cardboard glasses, the trend should show a little more staying power this time around.

“2009 is going to be a watershed year,” Engle says. “It’s going to be our 1953, but in a good way.”

“What amuses me is that the interest in 3-D seems to be driven by the same forces that caused the 3-D craze in 1953 — to lure people away from their TV sets,” notes Leonard Maltin, film historian and Entertainment Tonight movie critic.

“Nowadays they have to be dragged away from their Xboxes and the Internet, but the motivation is the same, to offer something you can’t duplicate at home. Obviously, this does cause a problem when it comes to releasing the movie for home viewing, but the chance of a brass ring in theatrical release is just too tempting for the studios to ignore.”

Beowulf was released in traditional 2-D, 3-D and the hyper-powered IMAX 3-D. Though only a fifth of the screens showing the film offered it in 3-D, the eye-popping versions accounted for more than 40 percent of the film’s box-office take.

Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert offers yet another opportunity for parents to shell out cash for their tweens’ Disney Channel obsession. MovieTickets.com predicts it will enter the top-10 list of movies with the highest number of presold tickets online.

It joins U2 3D, another concert film currently in theaters. More high-profile 3-D films are due in the coming two years.

“If you had a front-row seat at a Hannah Montana concert, you didn’t have as good a seat as you do here,” says Art Repola, producer of Best of Both Worlds Concert and vice president of visual effects for Disney.

“We have Miley right in the face of the audience, her mike reaching out, a guitar neck reaching out. We’re not trying to make it gimmicky; we’re trying to make the most of the fact that it’s a 3-D effect and that you get a much sharper, crisper image.”

And then, of course, there’s the good old-fashioned spectacle of having things fly out at you fast and furiously, and that’s what Beowulf offered audiences, particularly in the IMAX version, in which objects on screen seemed to land in moviegoers’ laps.

Imageworks’ Estes, who helped create the 3-D effects in Beowulf, says, “You go to a 2-D movie and it’s a group experience, whereas a 3-D movie tends to be more of a personal experience. You’re in a room with a bunch of other people, but it’s now occurring in your own personal space. It’s a pretty different dynamic. It’s coming at you — you’re not going to push your neighbor out of the way when the spear is coming right at you.”

In the recent past, 3-D movies have had a tough time finding screens capable of adapting to the format: 3-D versions of animated films such as Chicken Little, Monster House and Open Season existed but were on so few screens they flew beneath filmgoers’ radar. Only 200 screens could show 3-D movies in 2006; now, there are 1,000, with plans for as many as 5,000 by next year.

But will 3-D movies be able to show any staying power when they’ve flopped miserably in the past?

“Studios are definitely hoping that the 3-D element will help give moviegoers a reason to leave their flat-screen TVs and go to a movie theater for an event film,” says Gitesh Pandya, creator of the movie Web site BoxOfficeGuru.com. “Changes in technology have rapidly enhanced the home experience for watching films, while technology at the multiplexes have mostly stayed the same for years.

“I think using 3-D with high-profile films will certainly increase box-office potential in the short term.”

However, Pandya adds, “Once a flood of 3-D films come out, it won’t be special anymore. The effects will diminish. Computer-animated films used to be rare and, therefore, major events, but now there are too many and are no longer special.”

Engle isn’t so sure. “Beowulf has suddenly pulled us out of the children’s programming mode of 3-D and taken us into serious 3-D,” he says. “A lot of directors are taking 3-D seriously.”

Repola agrees. “Great filmmakers like Zemeckis and Cameron are embracing this technology,” he says. “If you put solid storytelling with the right filmmakers and add this extra component, you see all the reasons you’re seeing more and more of this.”

Coming up

Here’s a select list of upcoming 3-D movies (release dates, of course, are tentative):

Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D: Brendan Fraser stars in this take on the Jules Verne classic. (July 11)

Fly Me to the Moon: Computer-animated saga of houseflies stowed aboard the Apollo 11 moonshot. (Aug. 22)

Bolt: Disney computer-animated tale of a dog who comes to believe that he really does possess the powers his character has on his TV show. (Nov. 26)

Coraline: Dakota Fanning voices the lead in this adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s best-seller about a young girl uncovering the treacherous secrets of a creepy old house. (February 2009)

Monsters vs. Aliens: Dreamworks’ first animated 3-D film is based on the graphic novel Rex Havoc, about a monster hunter who battles aliens who have disrupted cable TV service. (March 2009)

A Christmas Carol: Robert Zemeckis again uses performance-capture technology to essay the Charles Dickens classic. (November 2009)

Avatar: Humans vs. aliens on a distant planet. From James Cameron. (December 2009)

The Adventures of TinTin: The Belgian comic book hero who boasts worldwide fans and his dog, Snowy, traverse the Earth in search of adventure. Steven Spielberg or Peter Jackson is expected to direct. (No announced date.)

The Stewardesses: Remake of one of the most successful 3-D flicks ever made (it cost $100,000 in 1969 and made $27 million), originally a soft-core porn flick (which itself is due to be re-released later this year). (No announced date.)

Toy Story, Toy Story 2, Toy Story 3: All scheduled for their first 3-D releases between 2009 and 2010.