[ELI5] Why do movies always start with a reminder that it has been modified from its original format to fit my screen? Duh…right?
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I think it’s a disclaimer in case formatting or anything is incorrect. It’s basically saying, “if something isn’t right with the visuals of this movie, it’s the customer’s TV’s fault, not the people who made and sold the movie.”
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A lot of effort goes into making a film. Given all the movie ideas, concepts, scripts and such that are out there, the idea that any movie at all gets made is a miracle.
So if you go through all that work and then some broadcasting company alters it, you might not like that. You want people to see *your* vision, *your* work.
In the early 90’s Congress was debating a law that would mandate notices whenever a film was altered, be it cut for time, or cropping the image to fit screens of different aspect ratios.
In anticipation of this, the MPAA recommended broadcasters and such to start displaying these notices voluntarily.
The long and short of it was it used to be more common that the actual movie was “Wider” than most people’s TVs.
This meant when they made the movie for home viewing they *chopped off* the left and right sections of the movie, so you’re missing stuff. There could be important information, scenes, characters, etc, off on the sides you’re missing. So it was just a warning that hey, you might be missing stuff.
In the earliest days of DVDs they were either sold in different formats for different TVs or the DVDs would come double sided.
That phased out after wide-screen TVs become the norm and now we see the whole image properly.
You can still see the effects if you download some classic games, for example I’m playing through FFIX right now via PlayStation Store and the game is boxed in on either side with gray panels.
Always? I rarely get reminders that a movie has been modified to fit my screen, unless I’m watching it on an airplane in-seat media display. This doesn’t seem to be an universal truth.
More importantly, how do they ALWAYS know just how big your screen is gonna be? 13″ tube tv? 80″ curved flat screen? Somehow they always know how to format it to THAT screen. 🤔
Movies don’t always do that… just older ones.
Movie screens can be all sorts of shapes, from nearly square, to a really skinny rectangle.
But back in the 1950s to 2000s, our TVs were nearly square, compared to modern “16:9” “widescreen” TVs.
To make movies comfortably watchable on those old TV screens, the preferred way was for the studio to cut the sides off of their rectangular movie to make it fit the square TV.
These days, TVs are more versatile and have better image quality, so now, the preferred method to present a movie on Blu-ray or cable is is to present it as-is and allow the viewer to choose whether they want to crop it or stretch it.
Because sometimes the modification cuts things out of the frame.
The only modification that doesn’t cut things out, adds black bars to the top and bottom (because the aspect ratio of the theater screen is wider than your tv screen), but some people prefer the screen to be filled even at the expense of things being cut out of frame.
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