Not everyone can follow the comedy giant Jerry Seinfeld on to a live stage. Especially when he’s on form. And today, in a giant auditorium in Amsterdam, he certainly has the audience in the proverbial palm. “What’s with the bikes?” he says, launching into a smart routine about Dutch cycling culture before an appreciative pan-European audience composed mainly of multiplex managers and cinema owners.

They’re here for the annual Cine-Expo, a week-long schmooze-fest between solicitous Hollywood studios and impressionable European exhibitors, and they’re clearly lapping up Seinfeld’s shtick – basically a light-hearted introduction to some exclusive footage from his new computer-animated comedy Bee Movie (in which he plays a bee). The footage wows, Seinfeld rocks, and he walks off the stage with a contented smile. Job done.

He is followed onstage, however, by a diminutive 56-year-old man with a shaven head and slightly cadaverous appearance whose carefully chosen words hold the entire audience in an even tighter grip. His name is Jeffrey Katzenberg, he is the CEO of DreamWorks Animation, and he has come to announce both the death and the rebirth of cinema as we know it. “I can honestly say to you with every ounce of conviction in my being: I have seen the future of movies, and this is it.”

Katzenberg is talking about 3-D. Yes, I know, it’s been knocking around since the Fifties, mostly as a camp exercise in camera kitsch in movies such as Bwana Devil or House of Wax, or later as novelty value in Jaws 3-D, or later still in 3-D IMAX versions of “regular” blockbusters such as Superman Returns.

But this time, says Katzenberg, it’s different. The new technology is so flawless, so crisp, that it predicts and prefigures nothing less than a complete transformation of the way that our movies are produced and consumed. As significant as the invention of colour. As significant as sound. He is so convinced, in fact, that he announces a fundamental change in production policy: from 2009 all movies from DreamWorks Animation will be made in 3-D.

“I mean, this is it!” he says afterwards in a backstage green room, still pumped from his performance. “I couldn’t be any more confident or certain about it! As the man says, I’ve put DreamWorks’s money where its mouth is!”

When Katzenberg speaks the industry listens. He has a gift for spotting consumer trends and shaping audience appetites. He is the animation guru who, in the Eighties, single-handedly resuscitated a dying Disney brand (remember The Rescuers?) with a string of populist hits that included Aladdin and The Lion King. He is the movie connoisseur who, as the chairman of Disney studios, purchased and funded the edgy indie company Miramax and was thus responsible for the profusion of hip post-Tarantino movies and upstart production companies that defined Nineties cinema.

And he is the mogul who in 1994, together with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen, created DreamWorks SKG, the first new Hollywood studio for more than 60 years, and one that now boasts Oscar-winning movies such as American Beauty and Dreamgirls, as well as billion-dollar franchises such as the Shrek series (personally produced by Katzenberg).

Everyone’s on board the 3-D Express, he says: James Cameron, Robert Zemeckis, Spielberg, Lucas. He’s talked to them all. And, most remarkably, he has talked to the other studio heads too. “I personally went and met with the heads of every single studio and told them in advance of our announcement, why we were doing it, and why it’s an opportunity. And I’m encouraging them to do it too. I want to see the movie business migrate to 3-D. That is my goal.”

He says that of course there will be a transitional period while cinemas install 3-D projectors and audiences get used to the new 3-D protocols. And yes, there are the dreaded glasses to wear, but here Katzenberg expects some heavyweight help from the fashion industry. “Once they realise that glasses are an essential part of a 3-D movie-going experience the glasses companies will be the first to take charge,” he says, predicting a future of personalised 3-D specs from the likes of Ray-Ban, Oakley et al.

“There’s no question about it,” he says. “Why? Because any time there’s an entrepreneurial opportunity, someone’s going to step in and take it. If there is going to be a significant regular movie-going experience of 3-D, then 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.”

It is indeed pivotal for the success of the 3-D endeavour. One of the stumbling blocks of previous technologies was the considerable side-effect of dizziness, headaches and nausea among cinema-goers, all induced by watching 3-D movies viewed through freebie cardboard glasses. Proponents of the new 3D systems, however, claim that cutting-edge stereoscopic technology combined with those custom-designed glasses will make nausea and headaches as archaic as cardboard specs. Although, interestingly, no studies have been carried out on the effects on the visual cortex of watching say, a nine-hour Lord of the Rings mara-thon all in 3D.

Katzenberg expects that, ultimately, most cinemas will operate a “two-tier” system where, for a premium, audiences will be able to experience the wonder of the 3-D cinema-going experience while the rest can watch the cheapo 2-D stuff on the next-door screen. The films themselves are not going to be gimmicky either, he promises. It’s not about pointing sticks, fingers, pokers and pencils towards the camera at every conceivable opportunity. “I’m not interested in breaking the proscenium [the rectangular film frame within which most of the action happens],” he says. “Any time you tweak people on the nose and become overt about what you’re doing you break the bond that exists between them and the movie.”

But the best thing of all is that 3-D movies are impossible to pirate. To the naked eye, and the naked lens cap, they look blurred. “You cannot record a 3-D film off a movie screen,” Katzenberg says. “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.”

Katzenberg continues in equally ebullient form, holding forth on the future of the movie. The man estimated to be worth £400 million says that, thanks to 3-D, he feels optimistic about the business for the first time in years. He says that he’s not worried about threats from the internet, or the alleged damage that bad word-of-mouth among bloggers can do to his movies. “Less than a tenth of 1 per cent of our business is done on the internet,” he says dismissively.

He admits, though, that the rise of home cinema has been, despite great revenue, a problem for moguls such as himself. “I’m trying to protect a movie-going experience that has been, frankly, to some degree threatened by home cinema,” he says. And he decries, at length, celebrity-fuelled entertainment journalism. “Angelina Jolie’s life has become a prison,” he says, before launching into a pap-bashing tirade.

But mostly he waxes lyrical about the dawn of a new movie age. He’s excited, he’s motivated. He’s got the facts, he’s got the figures. And, crucially, he’s got the commitment. And even if 3-D isn’t the natural evolution for modern cinema you suspect that, with Katzenberg behind it, that’s how it will go.

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• Trailers

• DVD

• London Film Festival

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010