But the only thing that reliably makes me wish I’d waited for a title to come out on streaming is bad projection. Exhibitors are constantly finding new ways to make the experience worse - from noisy, sub-Applebee’s dine-in service to AMC’s recently announced plan to charge more depending on where you sit. “They had the entire pandemic to redo this place and it still looks awful.”Īnybody who still feels compelled, as I do, to see new movies in a theater needs a high tolerance for irritation. “It’s unacceptable to just have bare drywall like this,” he says on our way out. And don’t get Theakston started on the bleak spectacle of the multiplex’s lobbies, the result of ongoing renovations. It’s fixable with software, if one bothers to do it.Īcross the street at the Regal E-Walk, there’s a torn masking curtain at Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, an out-of-calibration projector creating oddly colored highlights in Titanic 3D, and a presentation of Magic Mike’s Last Dance that bleeds a few inches off the top of the screen. Almost as bad: The picture is trapezoidal instead of rectangular, a phenomenon known as keystoning, which happens when a projector is not set up perpendicular to the screen. I buy us tickets to various movies, and we sneak around from theater to theater.Īt AMC, Ant-Man is the worst offender, but in another auditorium, trailers are playing on screen that’s creased and sagging. Theakston, who’s also a member of the IATSE Local 306 cinema-technicians union, has agreed to spend the afternoon assessing the projection quality at the AMC Empire and nearby Regal E-Walk multiplex, the flagship locations of the two largest cinema chains in the U.S. You can tell when it’s happening because if you look at the port-window glass, instead of a single image, you’ll see two, with one stacked on top of the other.” He points up to the booth behind us, and sure enough, there are two stacked beams. “They just have to push it to the side when they switch to 2-D, but theaters forget to do it all the time. “It’s a polarized lens that cuts a picture’s brightness by a third,” he says. Next to me is Jack Theakston, a projection specialist who works as a contractor at Dolby Laboratories, who immediately diagnoses the problem: This is a 2-D showing of Ant-Man, but some neglectful employee has forgotten to remove the 3-D filter from the projector. Although a ticket to this matinee costs more than a month’s worth of Netflix’s priciest subscription plan, the image onscreen is so dim that it’s hard to make out much of the movie’s action and all of its glamorous stars have been turned dark gray. I’m watching Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania - in which she plays Ant-Man’s girlfriend’s mom, Janet van Dyne, and he plays time-traveling villain Kang the Conqueror - at the AMC Empire 25 near Times Square. But right now, they’re decrepit husks of themselves, their faces so drained of color that they could pass for cadavers. Usually, they’re two of the most radiant, dermatologically exceptional people in the world. Michelle Pfeiffer and Jonathan Majors look like crap. Discovery.Photo: PictureLux / The Hollywood Archive/Alamy Stock Photo "Barbie" was distributed by Warner Bros., which is owned by CNN's parent company Warner Bros. The combined release of "Barbie" and Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer," dubbed "Barbenheimer," has become a pop culture sensation - and one that might revive a struggling movie industry. "Barbie" raked in a stunning $155 million domestically over the weekend, giving the film the largest opening weekend of 2023 and the biggest-ever debut for a female director. "Everything about this movie and the toy is fun," Sheri Lambert, a marketing professor at Temple University, told CNN. People who spent their youth gleefully hoisting Dream House elevators, pushing around stylish Corvettes and keeping track of an endless array of tiny high heels were fired up about Barbie's big-screen moment. Many movie theaters were awash in pink as fans of the iconic doll came dressed for the occasion. The "Barbie" movie dominated the box office this past weekend, and you didn't need the numbers to prove it.
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