Classic James Bond films to come back to the big screen nationwide

They are timeless cinema classics that have largely been consigned to the late-night graveyard slots on the small screen - reports Scotland On Sunday.

Movies such as Taxi Driver, South Pacific, Top Gun and a string of Bond films were the blockbusters that once put bums on velour seats.

But in a back-to-the-future move, they are to be seen in their natural habitat again. A new breed of distributor is buying the cinema rights, enhancing and digitising old movie prints, and putting them back on the big screen.

New "classics nights" have been so successful that one national cinema chain, Cineworld, is about to expand its range. When it showed the Tom Cruise hit Top Gun recently, takings outgrossed new film releases.

Analysts predict audiences will rocket as more venues equip themselves with new digital equipment and start showing a wider variety of old classics.

Leading the trend are two Glasgow entrepreneurs, John Letham, a former electronics marketing executive, and Nick Varley, who used to run the city's Grosvenor cinema. They have acquired theatrical rights to more than 6,000 old movies, including the James Bond and Carry On series.

Next month, they are re-releasing the Martin Scorsese classic Taxi Driver, starring Robert De Niro, and in August Oklahoma! gets an outing.

Letham says the arrival of digital cinema - which replaces huge, fragile reels of film with dirt-cheap discs - has made it economically possible to return classic movies to the big screen. Taxi Driver will be a traditional film print costing anything from £2,000-£7,000, while many copies of Oklahoma! will be £50 digital copies.

Letham said: "With DVD, interest in film has increased. For us it's about the big screen. This product was designed for cinema. It's such a different experience."

The pair have acquired international rights to the Granada library, including the Rank films, and UK rights to the MGM/United Artists library. They will choose about eight films a year for re-release. In February they re-released Brief Encounter. Other forthcoming releases include Bugsy Malone and Woody Allen's Manhattan.

Peter Karsten-Grummit, of research company Dodona, said commercial cinema chains were already showing increased interest in old films.

"One of the guys in one of the biggest UK film circuits said the problem he had was that you can't get the prints. But with digital once you have got a digital print, you don't have to give it back. It's going to lead to a huge amount of availability.

"If you consider the fastest-growing audience segment at the moment is the over-40s and 50s, then it's easy to see the potential for this kind of thing."

The national chain that has so far embraced digital technology most is Cineworld, which took over the old UGC network two years ago. Five of its Scottish sites are in line for the new digital equipment.

Kathryn Allan, the operations manager at the chain's Fountainbridge outlet in Edinburgh, which has been showing old films and is scheduled to go digital, said: "There's definitely a market for it here and we have been doing well with the screenings we've been doing."

The new trend will be fuelled by the UK's publicly funded Film Council, which is spending £10m equipping around 200 cinemas with the required digital equipment. In return, cinemas have to guarantee to show more "specialist" films, including classics. Fifty cinemas in London and north-west England are already using the new equipment and Scottish cinemas will follow later this year.

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