Four major U.S. studios will co-finance the digital cinema rollout in Europe, which will cost around $945 million, says VARIETY.
Warner Bros., Paramount, 20th Century Fox and Disney entered into a non-exclusive agreement with digital cinema service company XDC on Friday, and will cover up to 8,000 installations in 22 European countries.
The co-financing agreement covers more than 65 percent of the value of the digital exhibition systems, including DCI-compliant projectors, servers, applications and services. The installation period will take up to five years, with each digitized screen co-financed a maximum of 10 years.
The commitment also includes providing feature films in digital form. Similar agreements with Universal and Sony are in the advanced stage of negotiation, XDC said. The company also hopes to interest European distributors with the same co-financing proposal. "These milestone agreements offer European exhibitors a viable business model to convert their screens to digital cinema," said XDC head Serge Plasch.
For at least Warner Bros., this is the first international digital cinema deployment.
