How the big screens saved the movies

Cinemas are trying to make the movie experience something soecial. Photo / 123RF

Movies are meant to be seen in theaters, with darkness on all sides and a bright screen in front, with speakers creating a cocoon of sound, with fellow audience members heightening tension and amplifying laughs.

Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk, was a movie made to be seen in cinemas, its crystal clear images blown up to the biggest size possible, its bone-rattling bombing runs inspiring involuntary flinches of terror. "

Blade Runner 2049 is another example of a movie that needs to be seen on the biggest screen possible, where its stunning vistas and complicated sound design can be seen and heard most effectively.

But making sure that experience is good for everyone can be tricky. Warner Bros. domestic distribution president Jeff Goldstein emphasized that the challenges involved with showing Dunkirk, a film distributed in six different projection formats, included actual celluloid in 70mm, which is relatively rare but allows the filmmaker to capture more detail in each frame.

"So, the population of film projectors is really low. Most of those projectors have been taken out of theaters and replaced with digital equipment, either 2K, 4K or better equipment. The niche locations that have film are few and far between. So what was interesting, just from an operational point of view, was to figure out how to do this," Goldstein said.

Theater operators, perhaps recognizing the opportunity Dunkirk presented to get casual filmgoers back in theaters, stepped up to the challenge.

Goldstein repeatedly highlighted the importance to Warner Bros of showing Dunkirk in the way that best shows off Nolan's vision as a filmmaker - a key concern for studios who remain committed to theatrical distribution even as streaming increases in prominence.

Consider the case of Amazon, a studio that, in theory, has the infrastructure and the customer base in place to skip theaters entirely and stream straight to homes. Unlike Netflix - whose executives openly sneer at theatrical exhibition - Amazon has stepped up their distribution efforts. This has a great deal of appeal to the people behind the cameras.

"Filmmakers want to go where they feel their work is respected and where a company has the resources to deliver on their vision," Christine Vachon, the founder of Killer Films, told Variety when the industry mag covered Amazon's increased efforts at distribution. "Amazon is delivering on all counts."

But getting movies into theaters is only half the battle: You have to make the experience worthwhile for audiences. As Goldstein put it, "It's one thing to advertise a show time and have a patron go to a theater - you want to make sure that they're seeing the perfect version every single time that movie's shown."

Enter the team at IMAX, which has emerged as the gold standard in exhibition over the past decade or two. In addition to properly training theater workers and ensuring that the air quality in a screening room does not degrade the equipment, IMAX focuses on important-yet-oft-ignored technical matters such as bulb brightness.

If something goes wrong at a theater, IMAX employees can fix it almost immediately because the company literally has a command center that monitors the quality of projection in real time.

"All of our systems are connected to our INOC - our IMAX Network Operations Center - and they're wired to that center through the Internet," said Colin Smyth, IMAX's senior vice president of global theater services. "So for example, if a system calibration failed in a theater in China ... we would take action on that. And we would contact the theater and perhaps remotely log in to find out why it failed and what we need to do to make sure that the system is being properly calibrated and that projectors are in alignment and the light output is, you know, right [and] it meets the standard and so on."

"When you look at a filmmaker like Christopher Nolan - I think I can, I don't want to put words in his mouth - but you know we can guarantee filmmakers of that caliber, like J.J. Abrams, your Zack Snyders, they're not creating movies for you to watch them on a mobile phone or even a laptop. They are, we like to say, they dream in IMAX. They want to see their vision come to life in the biggest way possible," an IMAX spokesperson said.

But if you want audiences to share the dream in a theater, as the original dreamer intended, then ensuring the highest-quality theatrical experience possible needs to be a bigger priority for everyone in the movie industry.