Dismal Projections for Theatrical Distribution
Dismal Projections for Theatrical Distribution
The major theater chains still don't understand their responsibility to audiences.
I love going to the movies. While I’ll watch movies on streaming and have a sizable Blu-ray/4K collection, I feel like the theater is the ideal experience because we’re asking to be transported. We’re going to a different location, we’re paying money, and we’re going to a dark room full of strangers to look at the same screen together. That’s not just romanticism—that’s taking action on your part in the same way that no one would say that listening to a live album of a concert was the same thing as being there. Furthermore, we’re paying a premium for that experience rather than waiting for the reproduction that comes later.
The owners of big theater chains feel differently. For all that our major directors celebrate theatrical distribution, Nolan, Scorsese, Spielberg, et al. do not watch movies at the local multiplex. When they see movies, it’s usually either on a studio lot or a premiere, so they’re seeing the best possible version of their movies. The rest of us are stuck with whatever AMC, Regal, or Cinemark want to show us unless we’ve got a good independent cinema somewhere in the vicinity. For the typical moviegoer, the experience is to buy an expensive ticket so you can see a film that’s poorly projected.1
What does that mean? It means that the film isn’t projected at the proper brightness and that there’s no screen masking. I’ve completely given up on any theater properly masking their screens, but the brightness issue is particularly galling because it’s a way to cheapen the experience. Lower brightness means longer use on bulbs, which means less money spent on replacing those bulbs when they burn out. While some theaters are now upgrading to laser projection, you have to make sure that’s what you’re getting (“Dolby Cinema” is also laser projection, but under the Dolby branding). I wish I could say laser projection was more reliable, but last year when I saw Oppenheimer twice in theaters, it looked far better in 70mm at the independently-owned Tara Theater than it did in Dolby at the AMC Parkway Pointe. Even IMAX can be unreliable if it relies on Xenon bulbs.
Earlier this week, I rewatched 2021’s Dune ahead of seeing Dune: Part Two, and I was struck (and slightly enraged) by how much better it looked on my OLED TV in streaming 4K than it ever looked for me in a theater. I saw it once at an AMC for the press screening, and then I paid to see it with my wife in IMAX at the Regal Mall of Georgia, and both times, I was surprised by how dim the picture was.2 I had simply assumed that this was an artistic choice by director Denis Villenueve and cinematographer Grieg Fraser, but no! While the film does have some dark scenes, watching it at home there’s a much better sense of contrast and definition that was lost in dim projections.
That’s not to say that home viewing is always an ideal experience. We know from Game of Thrones that you can absolutely whiff the brightness levels of how something should look for a home audience. But I don’t feel as burned because I didn’t have to leave my home for that. Theater owners still don’t seem to fully grasp that the rise of streaming has now put them into a premium business. They think that they can still run the same playbook as decades past without realizing that as ticket prices increase, they need to do more than just roll picture on a bigger screen.
Critics are in a difficult position because we can only judge the movie in front of us. It’s one thing to make sure that everyone turns off their motion smoothing on their TVs, but critics aren’t allowed in the projection booth. We can make sure we have optimal settings in our home theaters, but when we go to screenings, we’re at the mercy of the movie house. You would think that they would be incentivized to show the film as perfectly as possible since critics can get the word out, but reader, I have been to my fair share of screenings where the theater forgot they were showing a movie to us (looking at you, AMC Phipps Plaza) let alone remembered to show it properly.
I fear that as theatrical distribution diminishes, it will be far easier for the theater chains to point the finger at everyone else. They’ll blame streaming, they’ll blame the studios, they’ll blame the movies, and they’ll even blame the audience. But even if a studio releases a film to theaters, the audience shows up, and the director toils to make sure the picture is pristine, it doesn’t really matter if the movie theater can’t be bothered to properly project the image. As usual, theater chains will fail to see the bigger picture.
Recommendations
How have I not recommended Nonfics yet?! Christopher Campbell has been covering documentaries for over a decade now, and as the form has gone through a revival/upheaval due to the demands of streaming, his coverage is more essential than ever. Definitely subscribe to this newsletter if you haven’t already.
Over in 4K recommendations, you should pick up Remains of the Day, which is $21.71 (44% off). James Ivory’s 1993 adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel follows an English butler in the 1930 (Anthony Hopkins) reflecting on his life and considering how his devotion to his job and employer came at the expense of his personal happiness. It’s a lovely film with fantastic performances from Hopkins and co-star Emma Thompson. Also, it’s a James Ivory movie, so you know you’re going to get lush visuals that make the 4K purchase worth it.
Note: I receive a small percentage of purchases made through my Amazon Associates link.
What I’m Watching
Speaking of Dune, the review embargo is now up on Dune: Part Two, and while I’ll have more thoughts on the film after it hits theaters and more people have seen it, I can say right now that I think it’s the first great movie of 2024. While that’s admittedly a low bar to clear (“Better than Madame Web, you say?!”), I also think it’s better than the first movie. It addresses all the major criticisms of Dune: Part One to make a film that’s faster, livelier, funnier, and more intense to really stick the landing of this story (while still leaving the door open for an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sequel novel, Dune: Messiah).
Oddly, by addressing those criticisms, I think these films will work even better as a duology. If Part One is chilly palace intrigue while acclimating to Arrakis, then Part Two is the life of the Fremen with the tension surrounding Paul’s choices, questions of faith and control, and the fate of the universe. Part of that is payoff, but part of it is simply moving the setting to the desert and forcing our characters out of their comfort zones. It makes for a thrilling sequel that I’m eager to see again on the big screen (provided it’s projected correctly).
It brings me no pleasure to report that Drive-Away Dolls is quite poor. The Coen Brothers are my favorite filmmakers, and it’s been interesting to see them split off to solo projects. Joel notched a win with The Tragedy of Macbeth, but it’s pretty difficult to go wrong with a Macbeth adaptation starring Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand. Ethan (and his wife Tricia Cooke, who co-wrote and edited the movie) took on Drive-Away Dolls, the story of two lesbians (played by Geraldine Viswanathan and Margaret Qualley) who, during a roadtrip to Florida, get tangled up in nefarious shenanigans.
While it’s tempting to see Joel as “the serious one” and Ethan as “the zany one” and it’s their yin-yang mixture that makes their movies work, I don’t want to go that far after only one narrative feature for each. What I will say is that Drive-Away Dolls feels like Coen Comedy without the craftsmanship. The tone resembles the 1985 comedy Crimewave, which the brothers co-wrote with director Sam Raimi. The comedy is broad and outlandish, but rarely funny or thoughtful. More often than not, Drive-Away Dolls feels like a bunch of leftover ideas poured into a movie that never plays as more than an overheated rehash of better Coen films.
Over on TV, I finally finished The Curse, and I’m conflicted over it. I think thematically, it’s a savage satire of capitalist demands trying to wear liberal clothing. Nathan Fielder (who, in addition to co-starring also co-created, co-wrote, and co-directed the show) is clearly fascinated by how the act of looking at something changes it when the subject knows they’re being viewed. Lead characters Whitney (Emma Stone) and Asher (Fielder) want to be perceived as good people, but only on the terms they set and only with cameras rolling. It’s not simply that they’re nefarious when no one is looking, but that they’re desperate to construct an image that portrays them as the good people they think they are as well as centering their actions over the community (in this case, the indigenous peoples of the small New Mexican town they’re in) they proclaim to help.
The final episode makes a very big swing, and yet I think that swing is the only way to tie the entire show together. It’s not going to work for everyone, but I think it thematically works to convey the horribly broken marriage at the center of the show and the weaknesses of its central characters. Like Fielder’s earlier series, Nathan for You, the final episode feels both like a departure and a culmination of the show’s ideas. While I’m not sure if The Curse needed to be ten episodes (that feels like a demand of the streamer to ensure that people spend more time on the platform), it was a worthwhile show even if the characters were so loathsome and cringeworthy that watching them made me want to peel off my skin.
What I’m Reading
In addition to the books I’m still working thought (Before the Storm and Invisible Man), here are some articles that caught my attention:
The Year After a Denied Abortion by Stacy Krantiz [ProPublica] - This story absolutely broke my heart. It highlights how the pro-life movement is really a pro-desperation movement. I’d have a bit of an easier time of believing the rhetoric of anti-abortion protestors if they were also there to encourage the state to provide relief to women like Mayron Michelle Hollis, but they’re not. Instead, we have a system designed to stretch a person beyond their limit. We can say, “Oh, Hollis and her husband shouldn’t have done X,Y, and Z” but this story conveys the constant stress and instability that pushes people to make poor choices. What we see here is not a celebration of life, but a cycle of punishment and desperation where Hollis and her family are doomed to penury.
The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoebox and Handed It to a Stranger by Charlotte Cowles [The Cut] - This story went viral in the five days since it was posted, and I am extremely conflicted about it. On a macro-level, I feel like it’s important for people to share their stories about being scammed. One of the reasons scammers thrive is because they know victims are too ashamed to admit they’ve been had. When we’re open about being victims of con artists, it not only shares how the con was pulled off, but makes it more likely for other people to share their stories.
However, this story by Cowles has a lot of issues. As others have pointed out, Cowles’ stupidity seems far beyond a typical scam victim who may have received spoofed text from a friend or a supposedly desperate email from a loved one. If we take Cowles at her word, she is incapable of questioning any institutional authority. That kind of acceptance isn’t unheard of (they made a movie about it based on a real story), but it does seem to show that Cowles’ doesn’t seem aware of how any government agency or corporation operates, which isn’t great if your main job is “the Cut’s financial-advice columnist.”
And yet there are elements here that strain credulity, and make me wonder about The Cut’s fact-checking process (especially if, again, this is who you hired to give people financial advice). Can someone really just walk into a bank and withdraw $50,000 the same day? Modern scam operations work on speed and volume; how many people and how much time had to be devoted to conning a woman out of cash money in a physical location? To put it another way, for the con artists (and it seems like there were multiple people here), they would have to not only make sure that Cowles took the bait, but that her bank would give her the money the same day, and then she would be in the same vicinity as the scammers to receive a physical handoff of cash. That’s a lot of steps for physical currency (in an increasingly cashless world) when digital transactions and gift cards are the scammer’s currency of choice.
Anyway, while it would be nice if a story of falling victim to a scammer led to greater awareness, this particular story seems to have only led to people questioning Cowles’ intellect and integrity.
Can Ukraine Still Win? by Keith Gessen [The New Yorker] - While Ukraine has fallen off the front pages a bit due to the atrocities in Gaza, it’s still an important conflict to keep an eye on. This is an insightful article about the nature of modern warfare, what people expect, why those expectations are frequently upended, and what this means for Ukraine.
What I’m Hearing
Yesterday I wrote about how making four movies about The Beatles by the same director isn’t a great idea. There aren’t even four good Beatles movies starring the actual Beatles. The upside is that it sent me back to listening to Beatles music, so I suppose there’s that.
What I’m Playing
I’ve accepted that I’m just going to play a bunch of Final Fantasy VII for the next few months. Whether it’s Remake or Rebirth or Crisis Core, that’s just where I’m living. I know there are other games out there, but they’ll still be waiting for me. It also helps that there aren’t any major games that interest me set for release soon after Rebirth.
That’s before you get to the possibility of the dumbest person imaginable using their cell phone. Like you drove to a separate location, paid money, and are now looking at your phone, which you could have done for free at home. Anyway, there’s a reason Nicole Kidman’s AMC is vacant.
During the IMAX showing, the film also stopped playing for about 15 minutes because of course it did.
While 3D films are far less in vogue today, I can't tell you how many times I've been to a theater and the 3D was projected improperly. I remember sitting through an entire Planet of the Apes film with my glasses on upside down because it corrected their incorrect projection of the film. I've always said that movies are a multi-billion dollar industry where teenagers ultimately deliver the product.