hanshotfirst1138

It's staggering to me that you work at a cinemas and not have knowledge so basic I've found it on Wikipedia. But then if the public don't complain, I suppose that they have no reason to change. It's seriously first-grade math; a certain amount of information can fit in a certain amount of space. Dear God! You know between the death of celluloid, and the preponderance of uninteresting movies, I find myself going to the cinema less and less & just watching it at home TV in the comfort of my house. There, there aren't assholes on their cell phones, I can pause it, and if the Blu transfer is good, I don't feel like I'm missing a lot.

My Other Self

They don't hire projectionists any more. I know a manager at a local Century theater and she said that now that they've completely switched to digital the higher ups don't care about any of that stuff. The ushers themselves are now the projectionists.

It's the theater going experience in 2014. I wish we had some of those more "personal" theaters that are in other parts of the country.

Matthew Chmiel

I saw Guardians of the Galaxy last Thursday at an AMC and the masking was correct (2.4:1) as that specific auditorium masks from left-to-right for scope films. That specific theater's smaller auditoriums do utilize top-to-bottom masking, but I haven't seen a scope presentation outside of their larger auditoriums in quite a while.

I hope that's not the case moving forward with all AMCs. Ugh.

joliom

The average movie goer just doesn't give a shit about this stuff. When you consider that every one of Michael Bay's movies makes a billion dollars, you can see where their standards are at. For every one of us that care about proper masking, there are probably 10,000 that wouldn't even notice if you cropped a scope film down to academy, or projected it with a 15 degree tilt. Most of them are looking at their phones for the entire movie anyway.

fumanstan

I guess i'm in the minority, but I don't really care about the curtains masking the screen at all in theaters

Alan Smithee

Went to a free showing of "Pride" last night at the Regal I used to work at- movie was 2.35, shown on a common-width screen letterboxed with no masking. During dark scenes I could tell the full 1.85 frame was lit up (I've heard on a proper digital setup, you can make the black bars go completely black so they aren't projected onto the masking.) Didn't feel like a movie at all, and the screen was hardly bigger than my TV.

Afterwards I snuck into another movie that was about to start- this was playing in the biggest auditorium which had been re-done as an "RPX" theater. The original screen there had side masking, but they replaced that with a 1.85 screen, and despite the hype about RPX having a big screen this was not big at all. I'll admit the picture looked pretty good- no pixel grids or other stuff I've noticed on other digital presentations, but again it just felt like someone's home video setup and not a movie theater. Moviegoing really is dead.