Hollywood is pinning its hopes on 3-D cinema to vanquish the video pirates who are raiding its profits, one of the world’s leading movie moguls tells The Times today.

Jeffrey Katzenberg, the chief executive of DreamWorks Animation, predicts a future in which filmgoers will enter the cinema clutching their ticket in one hand and a pair of designer 3-D glasses in the other.

“I have seen the future of movies, and this is it,” he said. “I couldn’t be any more confident or certain about it!”

Long derided for its goofy cardboard glasses and creaky special effects, the concept of 3-D cinema is building an irresistible head of steam as the industry seeks to build excitement around a potential cure for one of its most serious headaches: pirating.

Pirate copies of blockbusters, bought on DVD in the back of a pub or increasingly downloaded over the internet, hit the black market at the same time as, or even before, the film’s official release, siphoning off a vast proportion of its takings.

The Motion Picture Association of America said that more than 90 per cent of these pirates “can be sourced to a single illegally camcorded movie from a movie theatre”, which is where the studios believe that a new digital version of 3-D film can save them.

“You cannot record a 3-D film off a movie screen,” Mr Katzenberg said. “And so the idea that in one stroke you could actually put a huge damper on piracy itself improves the margins of our business by 20 per cent.”

DreamWorks, the studio he founded with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen in 1994, will produce all of its animated films in 3-D from 2009, and Mr Katzenberg has been evangelising rival studio heads about the format’s potential.

“I’m encouraging them to do it too. I want to see the movie business migrate to 3-D.”

The cardboard glasses of the 1950s will be replaced by sleek designer shades with polarised lenses. Mr Katzenberg added: “The glasses industry will be the first ones to recognise that this is a sensational opportunity and they will charge in and make it happen.”

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