Reuters reports:

A couple of years ago, hopes were high that up to 2,000 screens could be converted to digital projection in time for George Lucas' "Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones."

No more. Reality will fall short of those hopes by a hundredfold, as there are only 20 digital screens in place nationwide and little prospect of adding many more by the picture's scheduled May 16 release.

"We've proselytized about this for years," Lucasfilm president Gordon Radley observed. "So, it's disappointing to think that it continues to take digital cinema longer to come to fruition than it should."

Lucas once fervently hoped that - at the very least - several hundred digital screens would be in place by the time "Clones" unspooled. The second "Star Wars" prequel was shot entirely in digital video, and the ideal way to screen such pictures is electronically.

As recently as last year, there was speculation Lucas might insist the space epic unspool only in venues equipped for digital projection. But the filmmaker quickly nixed that talk, no doubt seeing early signs that even several hundred digital installations was a long-shot prospect at best.

Now, the rosiest prediction is that maybe - somehow, some way - several dozen additional movie screens may be converted to digital projection by the time "Clones" bows. The problem is that it remains highly dubious whether anybody will ante up the multimillion-dollar sum needed to fund such an effort.

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