Screenmaxxing: Why Hollywood is maxing out the big screen experience | Film industry

AAt this year’s CinemaCon, an annual gathering where movie studios showcase their upcoming productions to tease exhibitors hoping to show them, Disney announced a new way to watch a movie, sort of: InfinityVision. Despite the cool name Marvelized, it’s not a superhero experience; It is a certification for premium large format halls (PLF). The idea is that any InfinityVision-certified display will meet or exceed standards — vaguely described so far — for size, sound quality, and image brightness/clarity. There are supposedly 300 such monitors already approved worldwide, although there doesn’t seem to be an actual list explaining which ones have been approved yet.

The practical reason for this extra layer of branding is that Disney’s Avengers: Doomsday will premiere in December on the same weekend as the third Dune film, which has a deal to occupy coveted (and limited) Imax screens for several weeks. This essentially eliminates Earth’s Mightiest Heroes from one of the show’s top names; InfinityVision appears to be aiming to reassure viewers that their other options, which are presumably Dolby, RPX and other PLF-branded auditoriums that already exist, are as impressive as possible. We call it Screenmaxxing.

Screenmaxxing is a large manufacturer of at-risk theatrical exhibitions. As much as many moviegoers complain about ticket prices or boast about the superiority of their home theater setups, PLF screens seem to be an effective way to lure them out of the house, charging a little (or a lot) extra for ensuring they’re watching a version of the movie beyond what they’d get from a well-equipped flat-screen TV. Technically, even the thinnest screens in movie theaters will be much larger than the television sets owned by 95% of the population. But theaters can’t justify an additional $5 fee on the basis of a certificate larger than your TV certificate; They need something bigger and better.

This has resulted in a wealth of PLF options, especially in regions with multiple competing chains, which in turn can feature multiple formats within the same facility. For films like Sinners or Project Hail Mary, the wealth of options can be part of the film’s selling; Sinners director Ryan Coogler does a better job than I can of analyzing the different formats and aspect ratios of his last film, the Oscar-winning follow-up Project Hail Mary. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Battle After Battle even brought back the rarely used VistaVision format, an analog version of high definition that had been dormant for half a century, to the point where The Brutalist was filmed in that format but couldn’t actually be shown that way. (One Battle has put out a few spots shown on VistaVision, in addition to traditional 70mm and 70mm Imax prints.)

This list of options will grow; Another new brand of digital projector has been slowly rolling out across the country, designed to compete with Dolby auditoriums. Barco’s HDR technology promises deep blacks, high levels of contrast, and unprecedented brightness, and adheres to the Alamo Drafthouse line of movie dining. These newly equipped auditoriums from Barco also tend to use Dolby Atmos sound, which should not be confused with Dolby projection, which also should not be confused with the separate Big Show-branded auditoriums at the Alamo (which feature Dolby Atmos sound and especially the big screens), which should not be confused with Imax, which… well, actually, at some point, will likely be confused with them.

So, how does Barco’s HDR compare to other premium options? I ventured to the Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn to find out. Brooklyn Drafthouse is one of three locations in New York City using Barco’s HDR projectors; The other two are at Regal Cinemas outposts in Manhattan and Brooklyn, where projects have been installed in the chain’s trademark PLM screens, called RPX. (See? Confusing.) Barco’s flagship HDR movie of the past few weeks has been Super Mario Galaxy Movie, but that animated adventure would be rainbow-colored even under subpar projection, so I went the other way and caught Barco’s HDR screening of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, where deep blacks, sharp contrast, and enhanced color can make a real difference in an often colorful, obscure horror film.

Compared to the Dolby projection of The Mummy, which I saw at a press preview a couple of days ago, Barco’s HDR presentation provides an extra visual bump, though I wouldn’t necessarily expect casual viewers to notice it. Scenes that standard or worse exposure might have made muddy or blurry were crystal clear, even when the film intentionally obscured images in shadow or distorted them with extreme close-ups and split diopter shots (which make parts of the foreground and background blurred and the rest of the image intentionally blurred). During one close-up shot, I could clearly see strands of gray within star Jack Reynor’s short hair. It was really like a Dolby display but a bit brighter, and basically the layman’s version of what the technology promises. And it didn’t distort the picture, in my view, in the way of a poorly calibrated smooth-motion TV on display at Best Buy — an unlikely outcome for supposed theatrical experts, but not entirely unlikely as executives tinker with new technology. Now that Alamo’s new ownership has instituted a phone-only food ordering policy for a chain that used to pride itself on a phone-free experience — something that union workers in New York have had to step in and try to stop — nothing seems off the table. But despite the irritation of phone flashlights occasionally penetrating my field of vision, dropping the actual Barco on the Alamo looked good. It looked much better than my HDR TV, of course, and better than a lot of other big screens. It wasn’t a conversion experience, but it was a high-level hall in a big city.

The broader question is whether another kind of brightness — another way of charging consumers for what they might reasonably expect to be a basic standard of theatrical standard — stands a chance of being added to moviegoers’ mental PLF list of options (if they have one at all), let alone helping save the show. Moviegoers don’t have to ask for Barco’s HDR by name to be successful; Simply having healthy competition in the laser display business can help ensure that audiences don’t accept dim images on large screens, and seek out PLFs when possible. Then again, a lot of the big movies themselves tend to need projectors to do more of the work. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy uses its dark tones purposefully, and the Barco projector brings out this sense of contrast. But take another look at the beloved climax of Avengers: Endgame. You can use InfinityVision all you want, but it’s still bland and dull visuals of a CG battle taking place in a nondescript post-apocalyptic parking area. Obviously, this had no significant impact on the film’s record-breaking box office.

However, the perception of an upgraded big screen experience can be just as important as the experience itself. For both, the most effective display of showmanship theaters can offer at this point is to build more original IMAX screens. Not retrofitted auditoriums that transform the multiplex’s largest screen with new Imax sound and projection systems, but new auditoriums that can show Dune 3 or Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey — films that sold out their runtimes months in advance in that format — in expanded aspect ratios. (Maybe there’s room to let Avengers in, on a trial basis.) This isn’t just loyalty to the Imax brand; The original Imax builds are different from any other builds, as they focus on height rather than width (again, Ryan Coogler’s video does a great job of explaining the details). Not every movie is a good fit for this distinct format — but a proper Imax screen, like the one at New York’s AMC Lincoln Square, is still so huge that even traditionally shot movies look great on it.

Unfortunately, there are only a few dozen of these places worldwide; The vast majority of Imax screens, such as Barco’s Dolby or HDR auditoriums, mostly use certain high-quality equipment. It’s much easier to modify an existing auditorium, replace some projectors, or ditch phone use in a notoriously phone-free venue, all to create a path of least resistance even when theaters claim to be seeking an unparalleled experience. Audiences are looking for this path, too, when they convince themselves that watching Lifetime movies on Netflix is ​​essentially as immersive an experience as going out to the theater. Screenmaxxing will always be a niche interest, one that may not be realistic to base entirely new construction projects on. But as much as it’s fun to go for the biggest, loudest, most visible display, at some point, there’s going to be so much choice that the regular movie theater isn’t good enough — a very different, and potentially devastating, form of InfinityVision.