Why didn't Hollywood ever settle on a single widescreen aspect ratio?
 

Does anyone know why Hollywood never settled on a single aspect ratio for widescreen movies? I know in the past there were several different widescreen aspect ratios used, but of course now there are only two main widescreen aspect ratios still commonly used (1.85:1 and 2.35:1). So does anyone know why Hollywood chose to continue to use two different widescreen aspect ratios instead of settling on a standard widescreen aspect ratio? Thanks to anyone that replies.

Re: Why didn't Hollywood ever settle on a single widescreen aspect ratio?
 

Why doesn't the world cinema of god knows how many other countries just use one ratio? Cuz whatever really. Some just depended on stock. And at times the ratio added an effect that the director felt would add something to it. Etc etc etc.

I personally like the variety and feel that certain ratios work best for certain movies w/ a specific world for it.

Re: Why didn't Hollywood ever settle on a single widescreen aspect ratio?
 

Because everything in the same ratio would be boring.

Re: Why didn't Hollywood ever settle on a single widescreen aspect ratio?
 

IMO the most unnecessarily used aspect ratio has got to be 2.35:1. Many films today are made using that AR for the sole purpose of filling up a theater screen and do not fully take advantage of it the way someone like Kurosawa or Leone would.

Re: Why didn't Hollywood ever settle on a single widescreen aspect ratio?
 

It depends on how the director/cinematographer want to frame the movie....I wouldn't want it to all be the same... the more the merrier. I do find myself liking 1.85:1 more and more, it is kinda nice having a bigger picture for home viewing.

Re: Why didn't Hollywood ever settle on a single widescreen aspect ratio?
 

And it doesn't even fill up the screen in a lot of the shitty multiplexes these days. Rather than opening the curtains, some theaters just put the black bars on top and bottom and treat the presentation like a TV screen.

Re: Why didn't Hollywood ever settle on a single widescreen aspect ratio?
 

Agreed. I was surprised (In later years) to find out that Terminator 2 was shot in that ratio. Considering that Cameron (And whoever the DP was) kept ALL of the main action in the center frame (Which is probably one reason why it stayed such a big hit on video & TV) Other filmmakers in the 60s & 70's would've gone crazy in adding info on both sides at the same time.

Re: Why didn't Hollywood ever settle on a single widescreen aspect ratio?
 

My local Cinemark does this now. When they first opened a decade or so ago they used their masking system before each movie. Now they don't even bother, and just throw up the movie with the black bars, which are distracting as all hell. (Primarily because of the low black level of their projectors.)

Re: Why didn't Hollywood ever settle on a single widescreen aspect ratio?
 

That sucks. This reminds me of the permanent *Cropped* blocking that so many discs have nowdays. For instance, there was *ahem* a nice booty shot provided by Kathleen Quinlan in The Doors that managed to be a big scene-stealer in two different theaters where I saw that movie at. Unfortunately, both the DVD and the Blu-Ray have cut the butt off thanks to the black bars!

Re: Why didn't Hollywood ever settle on a single widescreen aspect ratio?
 

The Doors was scope, so if anything you saw in a theater was cropped on disc then it was a screw-up in the transfer (or perhaps intentional in the case of a nude scene or technical error- "Goldeneye" had a boom mike drop into the frame which was re-framed on all video transfers.)

Terminator 2 was scope also, but shot in Super 35 which is a whole 'nother can of worms- essentially the 35mm prints could only be shown one way, but video editions had the whole 4x3-ratio negative to work with.

Common-width theater screens and now the absence of masking will be the death of moviegoing. A letterboxed presentation is nothing more than just a big TV, which I can already get at home. It ruins the entire point of making a movie in 2.35 as well, as they're supposed to appear BIGGER than 1.85 in theaters, not smaller!

Re: Why didn't Hollywood ever settle on a single widescreen aspect ratio?
 

Do you honestly think the general public ever cared about aspect ratio?

What you mentioned has been going on for decades. How much money did Star Wars make? Deadpool? How do you explain sold-out showings? Don't get all high-and-mighty and say it's a dumbing-down of audiences. Most people don't care. They still want the movie-going experience they can't get at home. YOU don't have that at home. I can guarantee sitting in front of your tv feels NOTHING like sitting in the middle of a movie theater.

Re: Why didn't Hollywood ever settle on a single widescreen aspect ratio?
 

To Tom's point, until widescreen TV's became standard, and some movies still didn't fill the screen, I don't think most people realized there was more than one theatrical widescreen aspect ratio.

Re: Why didn't Hollywood ever settle on a single widescreen aspect ratio?
 

It's a dumbing-down of audiences precisely BECAUSE they don't care. But those of us who DO care are the ones who will still come to the smaller movies that the "general public" has never heard of and doesn't care about- the stuff theaters are stuck showing when there isn't a Star Wars or Deadpool out. If we had a really good theater in my area I'd go to it every week regardless of what was showing. The "general public" won't do that.

Re: Why didn't Hollywood ever settle on a single widescreen aspect ratio?
 

To be fair, we had 4:3 TV's for so long, I don't think many people understood how widescreen works. Furthermore, most people had little 27" TV's up until the early 2000's when big widescreen TV's were available at a reasonable price. Growing up, I only had a couple friends who had anything bigger than that. 27 was the size that everyone bought for the living room.

It's strange to think about how I experience movies like T2 and Die Hard when I was a kid. Watching on a 27" screen from eight or ten feet away. But it always made sense. I never felt like I was squinting to see what was happening.

I also worked in a video store in the early days of DVD (around 2000). It was hard getting people to accept widescreen DVD's. Pretty-much a couple times every shift, you'd have to kind of explain how it works. Similarly, when I worked at a movie theater, there would be the occasional customer who wouldn't want to watch a movie because it's in the small theater. But it's all proportional (the seats are closer to the screen).

As for why nobody "settled" on an aspect ratio? They shouldn't have. I think it's a choice you should be able to make.

Re: Why didn't Hollywood ever settle on a single widescreen aspect ratio?
 

I was into it as a kid, not knowing the specific ratios, but the notion of getting the full image, since I would get pissed at the "this film has been formatted to fit your screen" bullshit. Through that I convinced my friend to get the widescreen Star Wars VHS tapes. The only problem: they were the special editions.

Re: Why didn't Hollywood ever settle on a single widescreen aspect ratio?
 

T2 is supposed to get a 25th anniversary 3D release this year... I wonder if Cameron used the 1.85:1 ratio like he did with Titanic in 3D?

Re: Why didn't Hollywood ever settle on a single widescreen aspect ratio?
 

No one has answered the question.

The simplified answer is that each studio developed their own proprietary widescreen process: Camera 55, Todd AO, Cinemascope, VistaVission, Panavision, etc. Each one hoped their system would become the standard, no one wanted to concede defeat and let their competition become the standard. So they battled it out for about 20 years. Eventually a very versatile, simplified version of Panavision won the day. It offered the flexibility to make 1.85 aspect ratio films or 2.35 aspect ratio films and you had your choice of spherical or anamorphic approaches to capture those images.

Re: Why didn't Hollywood ever settle on a single widescreen aspect ratio?
 

http://www.jonathanlack.com/2015/05/...no-longer.html

Sounds like they no longer have a projectionist?

Re: Why didn't Hollywood ever settle on a single widescreen aspect ratio?
 

And I don't even know why this is the case. The masking is tied into the projector, and the DCP file names contain a listing for "flat" or "scope", so that the projector knows which image to show.

Re: Why didn't Hollywood ever settle on a single widescreen aspect ratio?
 

This is good info, but you also have to factor in that all the widescreen formats had to work with existing 4:3 35mm projectors, at least once dealing with prints, since every cinema already had them, and very few were willing to upgrade.

So you had two basic options: crop the 4:3 film area via matting and blow it up larger, which affected image quality, or use lenses to distort the image both when filming and when projecting, which caused their own issues.

And then there was figuring out what to do when trying to fit these WS ratios back onto a 4:3 TV screen.

For the most part, Hollywood quickly settled on two aspect ratios: 2.39:1 "scope" for large, "epic" movies where the extra hassle of dealing with anamorphic cameras, or conversion from other camera types, made economic sense, and 1.85:1, which was a straight crop of 4:3 film.

An additional wrinkle is the Europe seemed to settle on 1.66:1 as their matted ratio.

Re: Why didn't Hollywood ever settle on a single widescreen aspect ratio?
 

http://www.jonathanlack.com/2015/05/...no-longer.html

Great blog- I posted my thoughts there. This is exactly the problem- theaters are assuming most people don't care about presentation quality, and thus alienating those who would ultimately give them the most business.

Ever see "This is Cinerama"? It starts out with an intro shot in about 4x3 (masked on the sides, usually with curtains partially closed) with a guy talking, then suddenly he says "Ladies and gentlemen, this is CINERAMA!" and the screen opens up to the super-wide ratio. Imagine watching that and instead of the sides opening up, the top and bottom shrink down!

Re: Why didn't Hollywood ever settle on a single widescreen aspect ratio?
 

When Cinemascope was introduced theaters would show the movies letterboxed on the 4x3 screens. There was less image. I would assume Fox installed 2:35:1 screens in the Fox Theaters that they owned for a competitive advantage.
Paramount developed the 1:85:1 ratio, VistaVision, to compete, touting how VistaVision gave you a bigger picture by filling the screen from top to bottom. Just like with our tvs. Paramount put out promotional materials comparing VistaVision to letterboxed Cinemascope on the same screen.
Consumers must have had some interest in aspect ratios as they became a major selling point for films, resulting in faux "scopes" like TerrorScope, HorrorScope, Hypno-Scope, etc, to promote films.

Re: Why didn't Hollywood ever settle on a single widescreen aspect ratio?
 

The reason for this was all TVs were CRT-based until early 2000s, when LCD and Plasma screens started becoming common. With CRT, the bigger the image, the bigger the tube, and the heavier and deeper it got, making it impractical for anything over 32" really. If you wanted a bigger screen, you got a rear-projection set.

I remember some friends having rear-projection TVs. They had poor viewing angles and washed-out colors, but the screens were up to 65" or so.

"Widescreen TV" wasn't really a thing until HDTV became standardized, which coincided with the rise of LCD and Plasma TVs, even though those were stuck at 720 resolution max for a while. So basically most people upgraded to LCD/Plasma, HDTV, and 16:9 WS in one go.

Re: Why didn't Hollywood ever settle on a single widescreen aspect ratio?
 

Simple ... Illuminati. Now pipe down before something happens to both of us. :tinfoil:

Re: Why didn't Hollywood ever settle on a single widescreen aspect ratio?
 

Interesting article that The Bus linked to regarding Cinemark. I first noticed they stopped using the masking a year or so ago but they may have been doing this a while longer. I don't understand why they made a corporate decision to stop all masking unless they are building new theaters now and cheapening out on the screens.