With the flood of new digital 3D films in development right now, it should come as no surprise that there are some older films potentially getting a 3D upgrade as well (like Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, for example). However, I certainly didn’t expect to hear about about a film that’s nearly 30 years old getting reworked with the new technology. I didn’t even realize that such a thing was actually possible, but apparently it is, because producer Richard Rubinstein has just announced plans to bring George A. Romero’s classic zombie film Dawn of the Dead back to the big screen in true 3D! That’s right, we’re talking about the 1979 original, not Zack Snyder’s recent remake.

The company responsible for the digital upgrade will be In-Three, Inc., based in Agoura Hill, CA, who have apparently impressed such directors as George Lucas, James Cameron and Peter Jackson with demos of their process. The conversion is expected take about a year to complete.

Rubinstein had this to say: “When Mike Messina and I began to investigate using In-Three’s technique, I was very skeptical… I couldn’t see how it could be used without re-editing George’s film, which I was not going to do. I was also concerned that converting a 29-year-old movie would not be competitive qualitatively with the new 3-D live-action features being shot today. I was wrong in both cases. George’s DAWN OF THE DEAD can be reformatted into 3-D without any editing, and the image looks spectacular!”

Well at the very least, this sounds much more exciting than that low-budget Night of the Living Dead 3D movie. Just having the original Dawn of the Dead back in theatres would be really cool. There is also talk of Rubinstein working on a sequel to Dawn of the Dead, which may or may end up being a good thing. What do you think?