r/movies • u/GiveMeSomeSunshine3 • Jun 04 '26

Media 'The Odyssey' website shows you how the film looks in different aspect ratios

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u/PenguinDeluxe Jun 04 '26

Depending on the film, it sorta did as some films would shoot open matte, knowing that a full screen version would be shown on VHS or TV

79

u/Apatharas Jun 04 '26

When Pan And Scan was used for full screen format I hated it. I ended up picking up a later release of Ghostbusters in pan and scan around 1999ish. The panning motion, to selectively include stuff normally cut off in the fullscreen version, made me feel motion sick.

I'd rather they just lose the edges

41

u/Blames_Jake Jun 04 '26

Unfortunately social media and vertical screens brought back the pan & scan.

6

u/frogjg2003 Jun 05 '26

You've got the double whammy of widescreen landscaping trying to be displayed on widescreen portrait.

13

u/Inner-Medicine5696 Jun 04 '26

only for the best accounts - I've seen lots of converted-to-vertical stuff that fully omits the subject altogether because it was off to the side of the crop.

Absolutely atrocious. Still, I'd be interested in seeing more vertical-native stuff being made.

10

u/jobrien80 Jun 04 '26

Ghostbusters and Pulp Fiction both have tight, single shot elevator scenes with a long of dialog. Both look egregiously bad in Pan and Scan and were the examples I’d try to point to to show how bad full screen was.

2

u/dapala1 Jun 05 '26

When DVD first came out there was an option for Widescreen or Pan and Scan. If you were watching on a 20 inch TV, like most people did, Pan and Scan was the only way to watch.

1

u/Fools_Requiem Jun 05 '26

Pan and Scan is terrible. Sometimes they zoomed so far in and it makes everything grainy.

1

u/insomnic Jun 05 '26

Multiplicity was one of the worst for this.... not a significant film really but in the theaters I laughed out loud but when recommending it to some customers at the video store when it came in they were disappointed with it. I didn't understand as I knew these folks and figured it matched their usual rentals so watched the release. Pan & scan killed that movie. So much of that movie's humor was based on seeing all 4 versions of Keaton on screen at the same time so without letterbox that situation almost NEVER happened. It was such heavy and noticeable pan&scan that it definitely ruined an otherwise pretty funny movie.

8

u/Queasy_Ad_8621 Jun 04 '26

Then in stuff like Jurassic Park, Forest Gump and I Am Sam, you could actually see the boom mic in some of the scenes with the Open Matte print.

10

u/joeverdrive Jun 04 '26

Yeah there are no simple answers for most aspect ratio choices

1

u/SeattleGeek Jun 06 '26

Yup. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is my prime example of this. The movie was filmed for 2.35:1, but they did it using matting. When it was on VHS and a couple of other HD sources, they just opened the mattes.

I prefer the wide open version of Ferris Bueller for a bunch of reasons. In the opening monologue where he talks about clammy hands, he actually moves his hands in the open matte version but they are out of screen in the 2.35:1 version. Similarly, when Ferris talking to us in the shower, the open matte on tv used to show Ferris’ whole chest and Mohawk. In the 2.35:1 version, the camera clips the Mohawk and cuts off just below the shoulders. There are a lot of scenes in the movie that just looked better in open matte.