| Editorial July 2007
R.I.P. Your Local Movie Theater
What has your local movie theater done for you lately?
- Charged you $8 or more per person to see a movie.
- Charged you $5 or more for popcorn and another $5 for a
drink.
- Put thin plastic cupholders right where your hands want to
find the end of an armrest.
- Showed you a movie from a scratched and/or dirty print.
- Used a dim projector lamp.
- Used projectors with so much mechanical "play"
that the image wiggles slightly, from top to bottom and from left to right, throughout the
entire movie.
- Projected the movie onto a screen that has had Pepsi stains
in the same spots for months or years before they cleaned or replaced the screen.
- Fed audio signals through a sound system not much better
than the $300 receiver and $400 speakers at your house.
- Left the floors and upholstery sticky.
- Hung illuminated Exit signs where they dump colored light
onto the screen.
Movie theaters are like cardiac patients living on fast
food: if they don’t change their ways, their days are numbered. That’s because,
for most of us, the home-theater experience can now match or beat "going to the
movies." We can get better images and much better sound in our own homes, in our own
clean, comfortable seats. We can have any kind of beverage we might want, from
caffeine-free Diet Dr. Pepper to Courvoisier. We can eat a sandwich, a steak, or a salad.
No one kicks our chairs, and if a phone rings, we can pause the movie, or ignore or turn
off the phone. A decent home theater beats the crap out of a multiplex movie. So why
bother going to the theater any more?
My wife and I are so fed up with poor movie-theater
experiences that we now go only to IMAX, IMAX 3-D, or Disney Digital 3-D movies. Spider-Man
3 at the IMAX theater was one movie experience I may never be able to duplicate at
home. IMAX theaters have screens that are five times (or more) the size of typical
multiplex theater screens, and their sound systems are remarkably better than those in
traditional theaters. Disney Digital 3-D is shown via digital projectors in typical
multiplex theaters, but the 3-D is so good that we can almost forget the other
shortcomings of multiplexes. IMAX 3-D and DD 3-D both use glasses that are nearly clear;
there’s only a hint of gray from the polarizing filters that provide the 3-D effect.
To get big audiences to return to their theaters, theater
owners are going to have to come up with some radical things:
- 3-D without glasses.
- Motion-simulation seats that move up/down, left/right, tilt,
shake, rotate, and oscillate to simulate being on a plane, boat, jeep, or in the Millennium
Falcon.
- IMAX-size screens in every theater.
- High-quality sound with dimensions you can’t easily
re-create at home, such as those provided by overhead speakers, and speakers set high or
low on, or in the middle of, the screen.
- Images projected at 96 frames per second or more to get rid
of 24fps flicker and motion blur.
- High-resolution digital cinema with pixels smaller than film
grain -- what’s now called "4K," or 12 megapixels per frame, for more than
twice the resolution of high-definition TV. This will put an end to damaged prints and the
mechanical jitter of film run through projectors.
Combine all of those things and you’d have an
entertainment experience that would be hard, if not impossible, to duplicate at home, even
with a six-figure budget. To us, it would be worth the $2 above the regular admission
price for Disney Digital 3-D, and the $2.50 to $5 more for IMAX and IMAX 3-D movies,
because we’d get an entertainment experience we can’t duplicate at home. Two-D
IMAX is good, but IMAX 3-D is simply amazing. The combination of the 3-D effect, the huge
screen, and the superior sound quality is stupendous. I heartily recommend The Polar
Express, which each December is shown in 3-D at a limited number of IMAX theaters.
I’d drive 100 miles each way to see it again. It’s the most spine-tingling movie
experience I’ve ever had.
But for movies not screened in IMAX, IMAX 3-D, or Disney
Digital 3-D theaters, we have a much better entertainment experience at home. We can sit
9’ from a 60" 1080p display fed by Blu-ray and HD DVD players, with terrific
sound from a high-end audio system that we’ve expanded to include multichannel
surround sound. We have comfortable home-theater recliners, and the room is acoustically
treated. For about $15 a month we get all the Blu-ray and HD DVD movies we have time to
watch from the online programs of Netflix and Blockbuster, so there are no worries about
losing the format war. I’ve never been to a multiplex theater that produces 2-D
images and sound remotely as good as what I get at home right now.
R.I.P. the multiplex. Long live 3-D, motion simulation,
spherical surround sound, big screens, and higher resolution than we’ve ever seen in
a movie theater.
...Doug Blackburn
db@hometheatersound.com |
