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When I worked at Blockbuster in the mid-1990s I was one of those annoying snobs who tirelessly tried to convince customers that they really wanted the rare “letterboxed” editions of VHS releases like “Schindler’s List” and the “Star Wars” Trilogy, and took pains to explain that there was actually more movie preserved in the smaller image between the black bars than in the full screen or pan-and-scan versions.

When DVDs arrived a few years later, I was deeply satisfied to be able to enjoy most movies in their Original Aspect Ratio (OAR), but in the early days of the format there were still a handful of careless pan and scan releases (Moonstruck and Purple Rain, for example) that wouldn’t be corrected with a proper release for years, and of course many of the original DVDs featured a cropped 1.33:1 version on one side of the disc, with the proper widescreen OAR version of the film on the other.

Now it’s been several years since nearly every new DVD release of a widescreen film provides an anamorphic transfer of the OAR, so the movie will be blown up to fill the width of the many widescreen HDTVs in people’s homes. Sure, movies with wider aspect ratios, like the common 2.35:1-2.40:1 for most major blockbusters, will still appear letterboxed on widescreen TVs, which are 1.78:1 at full screen, but that doesn’t seem like it would be an issue, as the TVs are so large now that few viewers can complain that the picture is not big enough. It finally seemed like the Letterbox Snobs has won the home  video format war.

Nope.

When we got our first widescreen LCD TV a year ago and began subscribing to HD movie channels, I noticed that nearly every HD movie shown on cable still fit the full height and width of our 1.78:1 TV, even though very few features are actually filmed at those specs. Even the most common 1.85:1 should still show a little letterboxing on widescreen TVs, but that adjustment is neglible with only minor picture loss at the edges. Still, the giveaway was that sometimes a movie’s opening credits would be presented in an even wider ratio, and then swtich to the full 1.78:1 for the rest of the picture.  Sure enough, the cable networks are still cropping films, only less drastically than before.

This was an annoying discovery, but I told myself that if I really wanted to see a movie in its full OAR, at least I could rent the DVD.

Tonight I watched the sub-average Don Cheadle thriller Traitor, and when the feature started up popped that old despised alert: “This movie has been modified to fit your screen.” I instantly p-ull the disc out to check that Netflic hadn’t sent me a crummy full-frame 1.33:1 version. no such markings. I put the disc back in and the picture filled my 1.78:1 screen. IMDB confirms that the movie was shown theatrically at 2.35:1. If you want to enjoy an OAR version of this shitty movie, you apparently need a Blu-Ray player.

It must take extra expense for studios to reformat their movies in a different aspect ratio for home video, so the only reason I can come up with for this new wave of regressive OAR refusal is that their remains an expectation that consumers will want their now widescreen TVs still filled to the edges, regardless of optimal presentation for any given movie.

This is a most depressing setback. We have widescreen TVs now, and yet still struggle to get true widescreen movies. Do we have to wait for a true 2.40:1 TV before we can watch movies unmolested?

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