Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Pan-and-Scan: A Market Theory

Law professor and movie critic Larry Ribstein's got a complaint:

Most of my cable channels show films non-letterboxed, meaning that widescreen is "pan and scanned" into a small screen, meaning that a guy in the middle of the frame will often be talking to somebody off-screen, or to a part of somebody's head (comparisons here).  They usually show you the titles in wide-screen, I think just to torture you with what you're missing. Here's more of the technical story.

I have been wondering when this will change.  More people have 16:9 aspect televisions.  There are a zillion cable channels, why not more of a choice than Sundance, Fox Movie Channel, and dvd?

The worrisome thing is that the filmmakers seem to be giving in, unless it's my imagination.  Pan and scan seems less irritating for newer movies. Are the movies being shot for small televisions --  for example, with the subjects closer to the center of the frame?

I've noticed the same thing and I've got a theory about why it's happening. First, the market for DVDs has become absolutely critical to the movie business. Lots of big budget films are expected to lose money in the US box office, relying on the foreign markets and, increasingly, DVD sales to eventually turn a profit. So film makers doubtless are under economic pressure to optimize DVD sales. This pressure is a lot higher - probably orders of magnitude higher - than the pressure that the prospect of network airings used to impose on film makers, because a lot more money is at stake. Hence, if the DVD market creates incentives to design films that are going to look in a wide screen format, we would predict that films will be made with panning-and-scanning in mind.

Second, lots of consumers have lousy taste and/or small TVs on which widescreen movies look lousy. (Personally, I suspect it is more a matter of taste and what people are used to than a technology problem.) As a result, there's a big market for pan-and-scanned (a.k.a full screen) DVDs. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, to cite a recently released movie that likely looks a lot better in the widescreen format, is available in the full screen format too. While the former is #4 in sales on Amazon at the moment, the latter is selling well enough to rank 9th. Hence, we speculate, film makers are deliberately filming their movies so as to be panned-and-scanned when made into DVDs.

Indeed, Harry Potter's Amazon rankings likely understate the economic incentive for film makers to plan ahead for their work to be seen on full screen DVDs:

When it comes to America's retailers, those who prefer that their entire television screen be filled may be winning the widescreen DVD vs. full-screen DVD debate.

Walk around any area Wal-Mart or Kmart and you will see that full-screen is the choice of retailers in this area. Full-screen versions of titles such as How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days are easy to find on disc. Want a widescreen or letterbox edition, and you have to look a little closer. ...

Although filmmakers and many movie fans prefer wide-screen versions of movies, the home video industry had to face facts, he said. ``As more of the public migrated from VHS, they brought their preference for full-screen with them.''

The good news (at least for Larry) seems to be that the growth of HDTV and various FCC rules requiring TVs sold after 2007 to have digital tuners may encourage widespread adoption of widescreen format TVs, which may finally kill of pan-and-scan. Maybe.

Update: Larry replies: "in my earlier post I feared pan-and-scan would become less necessary because filmmakers are squeezing the movie frame." According to my email correspondent Roland Cooper, however, things are way more complicated than either Larry or I thought:

Larry Ribstein is partially correct: films are being made now with an eye for both Pan & Scan and Letterbox format. Part of it has to do with the process. Many filmmakers now use a format known as Super 35. Standard 35mm filming often makes use of an anamorphic lens (2.35:1 or 1.85:1 ratio) to squeeze more picture onto a frame, and is then projected with a similar lens to make porportions appear correct. This is why sometimes people or credits appear "stretched" or "squished" at the beginning of older films shown on tv: they did not letterbox the credits, they just shoved this image into your standard 1.33:1 tv screen so they would not have to pan and scan.  Super 35 generally does not use an anamorphic lens, so when you see it widescreen" at a theater what is really happening is that the top and bottom parts of the picture are masked by the projectionist so that those sections do not appear on the screen. When such a masked film goes to video, those top-and-bottom masks are taken away and instead of having to pan-and-scan across the frame to get at stuff on the sides, the print is just adjusted so that it fits in a tv frame and no panning and scanning is involved.

For a decent primer, check here.

Yikes!