Bad Projection Is Ruining The Movie Theater Experience

Michelle Pfeiffer and Jonathan Majors look like fools. As a rule, these are the two most radiant and dermatologically extraordinary people in the world. But while they themselves are rotting shells, their faces are so colorless that they could pass for corpses.

I'm watching Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantum Mania , in which she plays the girlfriend of Ant-Man's mother, Janet van Dyne, and he plays the time-traveling villain Kong the Invader at the AMC Empire 25 near Times Square . Although the ticket to this matinee costs more than the cost of the most expensive Netflix subscription for a month, the image on the screen is so dark that it is difficult to distinguish much of the action in the film and all its glamorous stars. have turned dark gray. Next to me is Jack Texton, a projection specialist at Dolby Laboratories, who immediately diagnoses the problem: it's a 2D screen for Ant-Man , but a careless employee forgot to remove the 3D filter from the projector.

"It's a polarized lens that reduces the brightness of the image by a third," he explains. “They should just leave it out when they go 2D, but theaters keep forgetting about it. You can tell when this is happening because when you look out the window, instead of one picture, you see two, one on top of the other. He points to a hut behind us, and there are indeed two sticks.

Thickston, who is also a member of IATSE Local 306, agreed to spend the day promoting shows at AMC Empire and the nearby Regal E-Walk multiplex, flagship locations for the two largest movie theater chains in the United States. . He buys us tickets for different movies and we sneak from theater to theater.

On AMC , Ant-Man is the worst culprit, but in other audiences, trailers roll across the screen, crumple and fall. Almost as bad: The image is trapezoidal rather than rectangular, a phenomenon known as keystone distortion, which occurs when the projector is not perpendicular to the screen. This can be fixed with software if you work on it.

Across the street on the Regal E-Walk, there's a ripped masking tape on Puss in Boots: The Last Wish , an uncalibrated projector projecting strangely colored flashes on Titanic 3D and a bleeding Magic Mike's Last Dance presentation . inches from the top of the screen. And don't direct Theakston to the bleak multiplex lobbies, which are the result of constant renovations. "It's unacceptable to have such a bare wall," he says as he leaves. "Throughout the pandemic, they've redone this place and it still looks terrible."

Someone like me, who always feels compelled to see new movies in the theater, needs a high tolerance for irritation. Whether it's a loud Applebee's lunch or AMC's recently announced more expensive location-based plan, exhibitors are constantly finding new ways to disrupt the experience. But the only thing I regret about not waiting for the release of the title is a bad projection. If a cinema can't do its most basic job of delivering a clean, well-lit picture with the right colors and contrast, then you might as well tear it down and build a bank.

For some theaters, it seems too big. Despite the controversies, Empire and E-Walk are some of the best multiplexes I have visited recently and are definitely the best. Last year, I saw a Batman movie adaptation on a shelf in Hampton Bays, where it was so dark I had to read the movie's plot on Wikipedia to find out how it ended. At Don't Worry Darling in Farmingdale, the image hung three feet from the right side of the screen.

To be honest, cinemas have collapsed. The pandemic shut them down for a year and then disrupted Hollywood's supply chain, so when the multiplexes reopened, there weren't enough new movies to fill their schedules. Most movies premiere now in just a few weeks, and many are without theaters at all. Attendance, which has been in decline for two decades, is falling sharply, with ticket sales in 2022 down more than 30% from 2019. Regal's parent company filed for bankruptcy in September, and AMC has avoided the same fate (for now) thanks to the very investors who ironically bought the company's shares.

But image problems appeared even before COVID-19. Many date back to 2009, when theaters replaced their film projectors with digital projectors, mostly made by Sony, to show the original Avatar . Studios were excited about this change because it saved money by distributing movies online instead of shipping large copies of movies. Theater owners were excited that digital projectors could be programmed to operate independently without the need for the host to turn them on and off.

However, these demonstrators were highly trained engineers and problem solvers. Now that multiplexes are using automated screens, the problem falls on house managers, who in this age of austerity can be as overworked as ticket-tearing and popcorn-selling clerks. If the error is serious or requires more than just cleaning the lens or rebooting the system, you may have to wait several weeks for the technician to arrive, or even longer if no one complains.

Today, the most common problem that moviegoers can face is motion blur. One reason is that many of these Avatarera projectors are still working and showing their age. In 2020, Sony announced that it was pulling out of the movie projection business and recently ended support for models used by major chains. This was particularly problematic because these machines had a known sticking problem, said an analyst at Digital Cinema Report: “UV light from the projector lamp slowly destroys the screen hardware and the projected image loses color. The solution is to replace the imaging equipment once or twice a year. But this is an expensive solution, so few theaters use it.

Digital Cinema Initiatives, a joint venture between major movie studios, recommends that commercial theaters project their movies from at least 14 meters away, which is a brightness standard roughly equal to the amount of light produced by 48 wax candles. per square meter of screen area. One maintenance technician, who criticizes the theaters where he works on condition of anonymity, told me that in some places you can only get six-foot lamberts with old Sonys.

Worn bulbs are another reason for dirty shots. Projector lamps should only be used for a certain number of hours, usually between 1000 and 5000, depending on their wattage. But since one can cost around $1,500, many theaters are extending the lifespan. "A xenon bulb darkens over time because soot builds up inside its glass," says Theakston. "Actually, the headlight tells you how long the bulb has been on. I go to the cab and see the red lights flashing on the back of the headlight - oh yeah, a few hundred hours left - but they just let it run until it comes on. It goes off." Replacing a bulb is "a 15-minute process," says Theakston. "But it takes skill because these bulbs are under high pressure, and when they break, they explode."

Even when used as intended, 3D filters like the Ant-Man filter can obscure footage by up to four feet. Cinemas often compensate by installing high-gain silver screens that reflect more light than standard matte white screens. However, depending on where you sit, the results will vary. These screens appear brighter to viewers in the middle, but when viewed from the side, the image can be twice as bright. (By the way, none of these dark issues help the fact that the movies themselves have gotten darker lately.)

I'm calling out some other moviegoers who are not only willing, but happy to share their specific complaints about the way movies are shown these days. But most of them seemed to agree that things got really bad when multiplexes banned masking, a term that means hiding the edges of the screen so that the projected image fills the entire area. "I get upset when the disguise is gone," says Gregory Wolfe, who has spent 30 years working on projects at Lincoln Center.

Technically, the lack of masking is a presentation problem—a sign that the theater no longer needs it—but it can also lead to projection problems. Movie theaters typically show movies in one of two aspect ratios: Wider Flat (1.85:1) or Relatively Wider (2.39:1). Until a few years ago, motorized shades were used to cover an unused area of the screen on the sides (on Flat) or top and bottom (on Scope). But some curtainless theaters allow images to wrap around the edges or set their projectors on self-framed films, depriving the audience of light and resolution. "You'll probably only notice this if you put a test pattern on the screen," the tech says, though it can be worse with non-traditional aspect ratio movies. "Sometimes headlines are cut from the sides."

"And those curtains weren't just for hiding," says Theakston. “You also need to protect your screen. At the end of the night, when the cleaners arrive at these multiplexes, they bring in blowers and blow everything away. This is why you see little popcorn kernels on the screen. And you can't notice the blank screen. If you try, you will get a perfect stain that will make everything else even more inappropriate.

But since most viewers don't know how bright an image should be, what masking is, and how to deal with it, if something goes wrong, even simple problems can appear. "I saw dead insects on the port glass, casting shadows large enough to obscure the entire image," said Genevieve Havemeyer-King, projectionist and senior digital collections specialist at the Library of Congress. "You just cleaned the windshield and everything looks good again."

In recent years, the backlash against digital and automatic projection has created a thriving niche in the old-school film market. Specialty theaters such as the Nitehawk, Quad, Metrograph and Roxy in New York, the New Beverly in Los Angeles and the Alamo Drafthouses promote their 35mm films across the country. projectors in their marketing. But most filmmakers I spoke to were media agnostics and told me that with the right care, digital can look just as good as celluloid, and sometimes better, because film isn't what it used to be either. "I made 70 mm. A string of sweet pizzas in Lincoln Square, says Theakston, and none of the last 70mm. The prints look like the old 70mm ones. the tracks of a slave. They are all very clumsy. Paying extra for a ticket is a cheap tip.

To be fair, AMC is on to something . The channel recently announced plans to install Belgian audiovisual company Barco's laser projectors in 3,500 US theaters by 2026. These devices offer better brightness, color and contrast than traditional digital projectors. They also have no bulbs and can last 20,000 hours before their lighting systems need to be replaced. (AMC and Regal already use them for Imax and other premium screens.) But laser projectors are still error-prone; dead bugs and faulty 3D lenses - and can cause problems of their own, including a tendency for green and purple reflections. "When you use a laser projector with a high-gain screen, there is a thing called speckle where the image appears to flicker," explains the service technician. "It's like driving down the highway and looking down the road in front of you and seeing what looks like water, but isn't water."

But by 2026, many of today's moviegoers may have switched to home television forever. Why go to the multiplex, even with laser projectors, when a new 55-inch 4K TV suddenly comes in for less than $400? Watching a movie in your living room will never compare to watching a movie in a large movie theater with well-maintained equipment, but modern TVs can still produce a better picture than a typical home theater. LED screens have become so good and cheap that there is even talk of replacing screens in cinemas.

One reason for the lack of urgency in solving the design crisis may be that the people who make movies see them differently than we do. Before industry screenings for director and screenwriter members, an army of technicians service every projector, lamp and screen to make sure the films are flawless. Now the biggest proponents of the theatrical experience—Nolan, Scorsese, Spielberg, Tarantino—have custom theaters in their homes that surpass any place you or I can snag Tenet or Fabelmans . ( The Wall Street Journal describes one such attraction: "In his 1940s Art Deco design room, with frosted glass chandeliers, cherry wood ribs and beaten brass plates, Mr. Spielberg sits behind the top row of stadium seats. and controls the entire experience "with your remote").

To show me what the other half looks like, Theakston takes me to the latest private theater where he works, a Dolby 88 theater on 55th Street, which houses two massive Christie Eclipse E3LH high dynamic range laser projectors. . I'm sitting in the middle of the room and Top Gun: Maverick comes on the screen. As Tom Cruise maintains the Air Force's hypersonic ramjet program by destroying a plane at Mach 10, Theakston whispers over the Dolby Atmos surround sound, "We've got 32 feet in here!" My cornea can feel the difference.