10 Problems With The Modern Movie Industry Nobody Ever Admits

7. Cinemas Can't Project The Movies Properly

Say you can get to see a movie you wanted to watch and, in a twist of Kylo Ren proportions, the audience is quiet and well behaved. That's it all sorted then, right? The cinema is the best place to watch movies, after all. Except cinemas seem to be actively trying to sabotage their own industry by ensuring their product is shoddier than even a mid-range home entertainment system. Movies come in all sorts of aspect ratios - usually one of 1.85:1, 2.35:1, but sometimes 4:3 or 16:9 (and other, odd ones) - but a cinema screen is static; it's whatever size it is. Now, you obviously can project in any of these ratios and just have the extremities of the screen in black or covered by curtains, but for some reasons cinemas appear to think it's better to fill the whole screen at any cost, cropping out some of the movie if needs be. The rationale seems to be that audiences want a view-dominating image, but I'd wager they'd rather see the film the cinematographer pained to shoot. I once saw a film where the entire image was zoomed in by 50%. I'm not kidding - when we had close-ups the faces couldn't fit on the screen. I went out to complain to an usher who flat out refused to see the problem: "We tried it but the image was smaller." Mate, do you even watch movies? This typically affects movies in 1.85:1, having their tops and bottoms chopped of to be made to be 2.35:1, which is a particular pain; movies in this ratio are typically not the massive blockbusters, but rather films where the artistry is a big part of the appeal. Projecting them in the wrong ratio is literally ruining the movie.