Originally Posted by grahamcrowden:
“Not 100% sure but I'm guessing that all the 2.35:1 movies this Xmas are receiving their terrestrial premier or at least their terrestrial HD premier so all the films the channels have left to show that they've owned for a while are likely to carry on in the wrong ratio.”
“Not 100% sure but I'm guessing that all the 2.35:1 movies this Xmas are receiving their terrestrial premier or at least their terrestrial HD premier so all the films the channels have left to show that they've owned for a while are likely to carry on in the wrong ratio.”
Yep, it'll be pot luck as to which films are screened at the correct ratio, at least for the time being. Or, worse still, this Christmas may have been a blip and we'll have nothing but cropped presentations again for the forseeable future!
The big test will be RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK on Wednesday, the first smack-in-the-middle-of-evening-primetime slot for a 2.35:1 film. If it's OAR, then it's likely (but only 'likely') that the Beeb has turned a corner. So far, everything else screened in the correct ratio has been afternoon or early evening, on the outer edges of primetime.
The reason they gave for screening a 4:3 print of ROTLA on BBC 1 the last time was that they were contractually forbidden from showing a 16:9 version of the film. They could either show 4:3 or the full letterboxed 2.35:1 version. At the time, they felt the primetime audience wasn't ready for letterboxing, so they went with the worst possible alternative.
This time around may be different. We live in hope...




