The good news about Fathom events is they aren’t running off of prints. Fathom pushes these things from their harddrive (or where ever they’re running it) to the satellite feed which then gets picked up by the theaters. They might not have the brightness up far enough but the process up to that point is out of the local theater’s hands. It’s a neat system, though so far it’s only been used for some fairly lame stuff like a Celine Dion concert, a U2 concert, and WarGames.
If this is digital projection, then it may not have the bulb problems of a conventional projector. Someone else mentioned seeing Lawrence of Arabia on the big screen in it’s late 1980s reissue. It was a condition of the screening agreement that the projector be properly calibrated and tested; bulb brightness was a part of that.
I don’t know about that for sure... the other night, Journey to the Center of the Earth was playing at the local theater in 3D, hence taking up the theater’s only digital projector, and they were running a Glen Beck show in another theater that definitely did NOT have a digital projector, and I remember a few months ago they were showing an anime thing in two theaters, and neither of them were digital (cause that was when I went to see Narnia in digital).
Wasn't this pushed by George Lucas and ILM? I know they were wanting to push in that direction, and it will definitely cut the costs of distribution.