In the two weeks since it launched, Gravity, the sci-fi spectacular starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, has made $191m (£119m) at the box office.
But it’s not just the size of the receipts that has surprised movie experts – it’s the fact that 80 per cent of the audience are prepared to pay a premium of between $3 and $5 to watch the film in 3D. To put that in context, it is a higher proportion than for Life of Pi or even Avatar, the film that broke all box office records in 2009 and was supposed to herald the coming of 3D as a mass-market phenomenon.