Subscribe
Apple | Spotify | Amazon |iHeart Radio | Castbox | Podcast Republic | RSS | Patreon | Discord | Facebook | IMDB
Podcast Transcript
You might have noticed that your television screen today is rectangular, but in the past, TV screens were more square. And sometimes you might have seen black bars on either the top or the side of a movie you are watching.
The width, or lack thereof, of a film or TV show is known as its aspect ratio.
Throughout the history of cinema, aspect ratios have changed drastically, as have the ways images were captured and recorded.
Learn more about wide-screen film formats, how they work, and why they were developed on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
I’ve always had a soft spot for large-screen and wide-screen films. As I’ve mentioned before, I have a pretty sizable film collection, and one of the things I’ve gone out of my way to collect is wide-screen films.
Over the years, I’ve spent a fair amount of time researching not just the films released in these formats, but also the various techniques used. So, I figured it was time to put all this knowledge to use.
Early motion pictures used 35mm film running vertically through the camera. A standard frame was four perforations tall and had an image close to 1.33:1, meaning the image was 1.33 times as wide as it was tall.
This is the ratio later associated with early analog broadcast television.
When optical sound arrived in the late 1920s, the soundtrack had to be printed along one side of the film. That reduced the image area and briefly produced awkward, nearly square ratios.
In 1932, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences standardized what became known as the Academy ratio, which is about 1.37:1. This became the dominant theatrical format until the early 1950s.
As I mentioned, for standard theatrical 35mm film, the film runs vertically through the camera and projector. Each frame is normally 4 perforations high, often called 4-perf 35mm. Each perforation is a sprocket hole, located on either side of the film.
Many classic films from the 1930s and 1940s, such as Casablanca, It’s a Wonderful Life, Citizen Kane, The Wizard of Oz, and Gone With the Wind, were shot using the Academy Ratio on 35mm film.
After World War II, television spread rapidly in the United States. In 1946, only a tiny number of American households had a TV set. By the early 1950s, millions did, and by the end of the decade, television had become a normal part of American home life.
This hit the movie industry hard. Before television, movie theaters were one of the main sources of mass entertainment. People went to the movies regularly, often weekly. Television changed that by offering free entertainment at home: news, sports, comedy, drama, variety shows, and eventually movies themselves.
Hollywood could not compete with television by offering greater convenience. The TV was already in the living room. So the motion picture industry tried to compete by making theatrical movies feel bigger, more spectacular, and more immersive than anything a viewer could see on a small black-and-white television screen.
The trick was how to use the same 35mm film to create something bigger.
Here, I should note why widescreen formats are preferable to the squarish Academy format, which was also used in early TVs.
Wide images appear bigger because they fill more of your horizontal field of view, which is how humans naturally perceive space. Our vision is wider than it is tall, so an image that stretches left and right feels closer to the way we experience the real world.
This is especially powerful in a theater. A wide image extends toward the viewer’s peripheral vision, so the audience feels less like they are looking at a picture and more like they are looking into a large environment.
The format that really launched the widescreen boom was Cinerama, which was introduced commercially in 1952. Cinerama used three synchronized 35mm cameras shooting side by side through three lenses. In theaters, three synchronized projectors threw three separate images onto a deeply curved screen. The result was an extremely wide image, roughly around 2.59:1
Cinerama was astonishing, but it was also a nightmare. The cameras were bulky, close-ups were difficult, the seams between the three images could be visible, and theaters needed special projectors, a huge curved screen, and careful alignment
The only remaining operating public venue that can present true three-strip Cinerama is the Pictureville Cinema at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford, England. There are still Cinerama theaters in Seattle and Los Angeles, but they can’t show Cinerama films.
A better solution was needed that didn’t require three times the film, cameras, and projectors.
The first truly practical mass-market widescreen process was CinemaScope, launched by 20th Century Fox in 1953 with the film The Robe. CinemaScope used ordinary 35mm film but added a crucial trick: anamorphic lenses.
An anamorphic camera lens squeezed a wide image horizontally onto a standard 35mm frame. During projection, another anamorphic lens stretched the image back to its proper width.
Early CinemaScope had an aspect ratio of about 2.55:1 when used with magnetic stereo sound and no optical soundtrack. Later, when optical sound was added for wider theater compatibility, the standard settled closer to 2.35:1, which was later revised to the modern 2.39:1 theatrical anamorphic standard.
CinemaScope mattered because it was practical. Studios could shoot on 35mm, theaters could adapt existing projectors with anamorphic lenses, and audiences saw a dramatically wider image.
Not every studio wanted to license CinemaScope or deal with anamorphic lenses. The simplest alternative was called flat widescreen. It usually had an aspect ratio of 1.66:1, 1.75:1, or 1.85:1.
This method used standard 35mm spherical lenses. The camera photographed a normal frame, but the top and bottom were masked off in projection, creating a wider rectangle. This was called matting. The image was not optically squeezed. It was simply cropped.
The problem with cropping is that it exposes a smaller part of the film, resulting in lower resolution and lower quality.
There came a relatively simple solution to the problem of anamorphic lenses and cropping. Paramount introduced VistaVision in 1954, beginning with the film White Christmas. Instead of squeezing the image anamorphically, VistaVision used a larger negative area by running standard 35mm film horizontally through the camera rather than vertically.
As I mentioned, normal 35mm motion-picture film runs vertically and uses a four-perforation frame. VistaVision turned the film sideways and used eight perforations per frame, producing a much larger image area. Paramount called this the “Lazy 8” system.
The drawback was that true horizontal VistaVision projection required special projectors. Most theaters simply received standard vertical 35mm reduction prints, which meant audiences got some benefit, but not the full large-format experience.
Paramount largely abandoned VistaVision as a primary production format by the early 1960s, although it survived for decades in visual effects because its large negative was useful for compositing. The original Star Wars films used VistaVision for effects work.
Cinerama, Cinemascope, and VistaVision were all attempts to try to use standard 35mm film to create a widescreen theater experience. Eventually, it became obvious that the solution wasn’t trying to adapt 35mm film; it was the creation of a larger film stock.
Film producer Mike Todd, one of the original promoters of Cinerama, wanted the impact of Cinerama without three cameras and three projectors. The result was Todd-AO, introduced with Oklahoma! in 1955.
Todd-AO used 65mm negative film for photography and 70mm film for release prints. The extra 5mm on the print was used for magnetic soundtracks. The standard 65/70mm frame used five perforations per frame and produced a very sharp image, commonly projected at about 2.20:1.
Even though it was filmed in 65mm, the film size is commonly referred to as 70mm.
The format was expensive, but the results were beautiful. 70mm prints were brighter, sharper, steadier, and had richer sound than ordinary 35mm prints. For decades, 70mm became the premium roadshow format for major releases.
Roadshow films were major motion pictures presented more like a theatrical event than a regular movie screening. They usually had reserved seats, higher ticket prices, limited engagements in select big-city theaters, souvenir programs, overtures, intermissions, and sometimes exit music.
Many were shown in premium formats such as 70mm. The idea was to make a film feel prestigious and special, closer to attending a Broadway show or opera than simply going to the movies.
Other 70mm formats soon followed. One of the widest major film formats was MGM Camera 65, later known as Ultra Panavision 70. It used 65mm negative film like Todd-AO, but added a mild anamorphic squeeze. This created an extremely wide projected ratio of about 2.76:1.
Super Panavision 70 was similar to Todd-AO but Unlike Ultra Panavision, it did not use an anamorphic lens.
The heyday of 70mm film was from the mid 1950s through the 1960s. Some of the greatest films of all time, such as Ben-Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, The Sound of Music, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, were all shot on 70mm film.
By the 1970s and 1980s, true 70mm films declined in popularity. It was expensive; cameras were large; film stock and processing cost more; and improved 35mm stocks made smaller formats look better. Many “70mm” releases were just blow-ups from 35mm rather than true 70mm originals.
However, 70mm film never really went away.
One company in particular realized that you could make something even bigger. Just as VistaVision created a larger, wider image by turning 35mm film sideways, it eventually dawned on someone that they could create a truly monstrous image by turning a 70mm film sideways. The company was IMAX.
IMAX began in Canada in the late 1960s. Its founders developed a system using 70mm film running horizontally, with each frame spread across 15 perforations. This produced an image area far larger than standard film formats.
IMAX wasn’t technically a widescreen format. Its aspect ratio is usually 1.90:1, which isn’t as wide as other formats, but the sheer size of the screen compensated for that.
A classic IMAX screen is often around 72 feet wide by 52 feet tall. That gives an area of 3,744 square feet or about 348 square meters.
The first IMAX film, Tiger Child, was shown at Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan. The first permanent IMAX theater opened in 1971 at the Cinesphere at Ontario Place in Toronto, where it showed North of Superior.
IMAX theaters were primarily built in places like museums, theme parks, and zoos.
The first IMAX movie I ever saw was in 1979 at what was then Marriott’s Great America outside Chicago. It was a specialty-built IMAX theater that showed the short film To Fly!.
However, in the 2000s, directors began using large-format films for parts of big-budget movies again.
Christopher Nolan became the central figure in this revival, using IMAX film for major sequences in The Dark Knight, Interstellar, Dunkirk, Tenet, and Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer was especially important because it used both color and black-and-white 65mm IMAX photography, helping turn 70mm IMAX screenings into a major box-office event.
His 2026 film, The Odyssey, is the first feature film to be shot entirely in IMAX.
Paul Thomas Anderson shot The Master partly in 65mm, and Quentin Tarantino revived Ultra Panavision 70 for The Hateful Eight.
2024’s The Brutalist was shot in VisaVision, the first film shot in that format since 1961. The 2026 Best Picture winner, One Battle After Another, also used VistaVision.
The reason for the current revival in wide-screen film formats is, surprisingly, the same as the reason for the format’s creation in the 1950s. Today, many people have high-quality, large-screen televisions in their homes and have access to streaming services.
The motion picture industry needs to give people a reason to come to the theater, and the way to do that is to provide an experience that can’t be had at home. This is done through gigantic screens and movies that can fill them.
I’ll close by answering a question that some of you are probably asking. Nowadays, everything is digital. Movie theater projectors are digital. What would be the digital equivalent of 70mm or IMAX film in terms of quality and resolution?
There isn’t a direct correlation between film size and digital resolution. A regular movie shot on 35mm film can easily be transferred to 4k, which is the highest resolution consumer format today.
A 70mm film can easily be transferred to 8k, and probably even to 12k resolution. IMAX could probably be transferred to 16k resolution or higher, if that were a thing.
I fell in love with 70mm films when I saw Lawrence of Arabia in 70mm at the Cooper Theater in St. Louis Park, MN, in 1987. They had a curved parabolic screen designed for wide-screen films. It was something I still remember.
From the three-projectors of Cinerama to the anamorphic squeeze of CinemaScope, from 70mm roadshows to IMAX and modern large-format revivals, each system was an attempt to expand what cinema could do.
Widescreen formats were never just about making images wider. They were about making movies feel larger, more immersive, and giving people a reason to go to the theater.
