Here's My Theory

Pick a Width and Stick to It

There has always been a problem with getting movies off the big screen and into the living room. In a movie theater, the screen is wide, while standard TVs are closer to being a square-shape (4:3 aspect ratio, to get technical). So to make the movie fit on a TV, the edges need to be cut off.

Then DVDs came out, and most of them were the original wide-screen versions of the movies. This meant you got the full picture, but there were annoying black bars on the top and bottom of the screen (which a great deal of people actually thought were cutting off the movie, when in fact it was the opposite). So naturally, the wide-screen HDTVs that were coming out seemed like a perfect match for a DVD player. However, the DVDs didn’t look so great on an HDTV because they aren’t high definition quality. So we completely skipped a standard definition wide-screen TV. This would have been the perfect TV to watch a DVD on, but for some reason it just never happened.

So finally, now we have Blu-ray movies. These are really the perfect format for movies on an HDTV. The picture is clear, and the widescreen movie fits perfectly on a widescreen TV.

Oh no, wait. It doesn’t.

I’m not sure who thought this would be a good idea, but plenty of movies are actually shot in an even wider aspect ratio than 16:9 (the size of an HDTV). So now, if you watch one of those movies on a standard sized TV, more than half the screen is black. If you watch the movie on an HDTV, you’re back to having black bars on the top and bottom of the screen.

What is the point of shooting a movie this wide if there is no TV in existence that matches the width? Artistic reasons just don’t make up for the fact that our TVs are one size and the movies are another. How much wider are movies going to get? Are we one day going to be buying TVs that stretch across an entire wall and resemble tape measures?

Can’t we just pick a width for movies and leave it that way? I love the resolution improvements, and no one can argue that HD picture isn’t beautiful to look at; but I see no reason why we can’t keep improving the picture quality while maintaining the aspect ratio. Seriously.