RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK Prepping for IMAX Re-release This September

The first, and by far favorite, of the Indiana Jones film franchise is gearing up for another theatrical release this year to help promote the series' Blu-ray collection debut.

Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) is no ordinary archeologist. When we first see him, he is somewhere in the Peruvian jungle in 1936, running a booby-trapped gauntlet (complete with an over-sized rolling boulder) to fetch a solid-gold idol. He loses this artifact to his chief rival, a French archeologist named Belloq (Paul Freeman), who then prepares to kill our hero. In the first of many serial-like escapes, Indy eludes Belloq by hopping into a convenient plane. So, then: is Indiana Jones afraid of anything? Yes, snakes. The next time we see Jones, he's a soft-spoken, bespectacled professor. He is then summoned from his ivy-covered environs by Marcus Brody (Denholm Elliott) to find the long-lost Ark of the Covenant. The Nazis, it seems, are already searching for the Ark, which the mystical-minded Hitler hopes to use to make his stormtroopers invincible. But to find the Ark, Indy must first secure a medallion kept under the protection of Indy's old friend Abner Ravenwood, whose daughter, Marion (Karen Allen), evidently has a "history" with Jones. Whatever their personal differences, Indy and Marion become partners in one action-packed adventure after another, ranging from wandering the snake pits of the Well of Souls to surviving the pyrotechnic unearthing of the sacred Ark. A joint project of Hollywood prodigies George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, with a script co-written by Lawrence Kasdan and Philip Kaufman, among others, Raiders of the Lost Ark is not so much a movie as a 115-minute thrill ride.

In June of 1981 director Steven Spielberg and executive producer George Lucas introduced the world to Indiana Jones when the unforgettable Raiders of the Lost Ark debuted in theaters. Now, the popular film will be hitting IMAX screens for a limited engagement September 7th through September 13th, 2012.

Spielberg, who also had a hand in converting Jurassic Park to 3D for an upcoming re-release, offered a few words about Raiders' return to theaters:

"For me, it’s always been the bigger the screen, the better. It’s the only marked contrast we have to the generations that are seeing our movies on phones and hand-held platforms. It’s a complete relief to be able to see a film that many people have just experienced on a palm-sized platform technology, suddenly hurled at that them on an Imax-sized screen."

"‘Raiders’ is a movie of my own, that I can actually stand to watch from beginning to end. In that sense, it has a special place in my heart. I don’t rewrite it in my mind; I’m not kicking myself for what I didn’t do. I’m just going along for the ride like everybody else. It’s one of the few films that I’ve directed that I can sit back objectively and observe and enjoy with my family or whoever I’m with, or even alone. Most of my other films, I’m hypercritical of them."

He went on to say that at this time there are no plans to convert and release his other films, such as JAWS and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in IMAX. Indiana Jones: The Complete Adventures debuts on Blu-ray September 18, 2012 from Lucasfilm Ltd. and Paramount Home Media Distribution.