In 2012, before Paul Thomas Anderson released his “The Master” on 70mm film, the format had not been commercially presented for nearly 50 years. His enthusiasm to release the movie on that film format led others, like Quentin Tarantino, to retrofit old theaters to be equipped to project the Ultra Panavision 70 format for “The Hateful Eight,” viewing the effort as “film’s saving grace.” Just like vinyl records, all the cool kids now want their movies to be on film and shown in 70mm.
So could either Anderson or Tarantino have predicted over a decade ago that there might be a half dozen ways that you can now see PTA’s “One Battle After Another,” which is being shown in yet another long-lost film format, VistaVision?
Just as in 2012, Anderson’s push to both shoot in and project the film in VistaVision did not happen overnight. It’s a format that has not been commercially available for decades, and like Tarantino had to do for “The Hateful Eight,” he’s spent a chunk of the “Battle” press tour explaining what VistaVision is and why you should care.
A similar thing happened with another Warner Bros. release this year, “Sinners,” which found filmmaker Ryan Coogler evangelizing the many different film formats his movie was available in (perhaps no person alive has ever looked cooler talking about film stock than Coogler does in his video).
Right now, “One Battle After Another” is only available in VistaVision on four screens worldwide, including in Los Angeles, New York, Boston, and London. That doesn’t necessarily scream “a revolution!” in how other films will be projected, but the push to allow Anderson to release “One Battle After Another” in this format is part of a years-long effort of reconditioning projectors and establishing the infrastructure necessary to get it to work.
It stands to reason that, if newly re-upped film chiefs Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy were willing to shell out big bucks (the film has a production budget of $130 million) to get people to watch Anderson’s movie in this very unique format, Anderson might not be the last filmmaker who gets the privilege of doing it.
The trouble is, VistaVision went out of fashion for a reason and was never as widely adopted in its heyday as some of its rival formats. It’s always been niche, and there are some practical reasons why this particular format may not make the same comeback 70mm did.
You may have read that several modern filmmakers are already shooting in VistaVision, even before PTA did. Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” was shot using VistaVision cameras, so was Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Bugonia,” and Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s still-untitled Tom Cruise film, which is also being released by Warner Bros., used VistaVision as well. The bigger negatives have some practical reasons for doing it, including for the use of optical effects like fades, dissolves, or credit sequences, and it was especially in vogue in the ’80s and ’90s, even when actually screening a movie in VistaVision had disappeared. Shooting in VistaVision is almost definitely making a comeback and will be seen again.
But that’s the crucial difference: those films — and we’ll see on the Iñárritu movie — were only shot on VistaVision, not also projected in it, the way “One Battle After Another” is at those four select theaters. That’s in part because only a handful of VistaVision projectors were ever installed around the world to begin with, and even fewer still exist.
The Warner Bros. Projection Engineering team partnered with a litany of organizations over the course of a year to modify existing VistaVision projectors. Warner Bros. already owned one projector, the Academy loaned WB another one, and so did England’s Bell-Theater Services. So, the handful of projectors that Warner Bros. does have available for VistaVision, including one on the WB lot in Burbank at the Steven J. Ross Theater, had to be cobbled together from a variety of found sources.
That’s problem number one. When it came to 70mm, movies even in the early 2010s were still being shown on celluloid as part of repertory screenings or classic film festivals, so while there were still projectors that existed and people who knew how to use them, there wasn’t the commercial use case or reach for 70mm. Today it’s an attractive selling point to get people out to the theater and away from streaming.
But one projectionist familiar with the tech explained to IndieWire that the people who are today projecting “One Battle After Another” in VistaVision all had to learn how to do so, and they were even trained by other recent newbies. Save for a few repertory screenings, VistaVision, for the most part., has not been shown anywhere since the ’60s.
Problem number two is that VistaVision projectors are unique, designed for a specific purpose. 70mm projectors are dual and can also screen 35mm film. But if a theater wanted to screen a VistaVision film, the projectionist explained he would have to move the existing projector — weighing hundreds of pounds and that have been precision tuned and placed in a specific spot — out of the way to make room for the installation of a VistaVision projector that can only screen one very specific thing.
That means that, unless a projector booth was somehow big enough with multiple ports to accommodate a regular film projector and the VistaVision one (he says it’d be like making space in your kitchen for two refrigerators), a screen could be dark for several days as projectionists work to install the new one.
What’s more, VistaVision originally used to operate in such a way that, because the film reels are so large, you needed two projectors, not one, to screen a film normally. Forget that a film print that is twice as long as standard 35mm is almost certainly double the price for raw film stock, the WB team also had to figure out how to take a 2 hour and 40 minute-long film and screen it horizontally through one projector on a massive “platter” system. That just takes up a lot of space, and “One Battle After Another” is the first movie to ever be shown this way.
Even how the soundtrack is presented via VistaVision was unique to “One Battle After Another.” In the ’50s, before digital audio, the audio strips were on the inside of the film strip’s perforations, meaning the image itself was slightly narrower. “One Battle After Another” looks so genuinely unique on VistaVision because the soundtrack is on the outside of the perforations, allowing for the image to reach its full aspect ratio. That was yet another thing WB had to invent for this very film.
Those practical challenges are just part of the reason seeing VistaVision come back into the mainstream in a big way may be unlikely. If you’re a film executive or producer and the choice is between VistaVision and 70mm with the same size negative, it may be a tough sell to opt for the former.
But Sean McKinnon, the director of specialty presentation and AV integration with Boston Light & Sound, said he’s “making the bet” that Anderson’s movie won’t be the last to be seen in the format. Boston Light & Sound, which worked with WB on getting a VistaVision projector ready so it could be seen for dailies during production, is currently in the prototyping phase on building its own VistaVision projectors, using its own design that would not have the same barriers to entry that refurbishing original machines did.
McKinnon said he’s less concerned than the other projectionist at making VistaVision work with the existing set-up in most theaters. The light sources, motors, and automation systems used for VistaVision are still compatible with the 70mm projectors. And when it came to “The Hateful Eight” in 2015, Tarantino arranged for 100 different multiplexes across the country to add an additional port window and put in a 70mm machine that was only equipped for that format.
So if VistaVision were to do the same, McKinnon believes all it would really take is someone with the wherewithal to make it happen. While he doesn’t see it becoming an everyday format, it can continue to be used for special engagements, and it’s not out of the question that repertory theaters and festivals will make use of VistaVision more often for classic films down the road. He’d be thrilled if they can get the now-four systems worldwide up to 10-20, whether that’s permanent installations or for road shows.
Those numbers may not move the needle significantly, but part of the reason it’s worth Warner Bros.’ while to keep someone like Anderson happy is because it makes the studio more attractive as a destination to those marquee directors. A WB insider told IndieWire he’s spoken with a number of filmmakers who have all looked at the unique filming formats as something that “gives them options” and lets them tell a story in different ways.
Case in point, Warner Bros. has already won the rights to Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” despite a higher bid from Netflix because of the studio’s commitment to a sizable theatrical rollout. Netflix gave in to Greta Gerwig and agreed to event screenings of her upcoming “Narnia” movies for IMAX (there’s rumors that Gerwig too intends to use VistaVision to shoot some scenes for that film). It stands to reason that someone like Coogler or Anderson, upon becoming a free agent again, among other reasons, could look to Warner Bros. if it means they can play around with a format like VistaVision that another studio can’t offer.
It’s just unclear when such an opportunity would arise again, if ever in the near-future. At present, Warner Bros. does not appear to have specific plans for a future film on which VistaVision can again be utilized, and McKinnon said that, though there’s been a lot of conversation around VistaVision, even in tandem with 70mm, that there’s currently nothing concrete.
But McKinnon noted that when “The Master” and “Interstellar” were tinkering with 70mm, the format still looked like it was a long ways away from making a comeback in any meaningful way. Look how that turned out. For the future VistaVision, we may just be in that same “trial run” phase.