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.”

Momentum is growing behind the man who revived Disney’s animation reputation with Aladdinand The Lion King and produced the Shrek films for DreamWorks.

A 3-D film of U2 in concert made a splash at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and the companies behind the format forecast that more than 4,000 screens around the world will be capable of showing films, sporting events and rock concerts within two years.

Spielberg and Peter Jackson, the director of The Lord of the Rings films, are working on a Tintin trilogy in 3-D for DreamWorks. Robert Zemeckis’s Beowulf will be released in 3-D this winter.

James Cameron is filming Avatar in 3-D, his first feature film since Titanic ten years ago.

George Lucas hopes to rerelease his six Star Wars films in 3-D.

Michael Lewis, co-founder and chief executive of RealD, a company offering the technology, said that audiences who remembered the old 3-D films would notice the difference.

“It’s going to work this time because technology has solved the issues that have plagued 3-D for 50 years. “We are taking the same science that Nasa has been using for years to drive the Mars Rover, that the military use for aerial reconnaissance and that the petroleum industry use to drill for oil and combining it with a digital screen projector so that you really feel like you are part of the movie.”

Nick James, of Sight and Sound magazine, said: “[3-D] has always had a gimmicky feel about it and it will require a rethinking of the language of cinema to make the best use of it.”

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