Batman Begins in IMAX

Cafe Society
1

I normally don’t go to IMAX movies, because I’ve only got the one eye, and the whole 3-D thing is kind of lost on me. “Hey, these glasses are defective, and my Viewmaster doesn’t work either.”

But anyway, I’m doing some work up in BC and I see that in a suburb of Vancouver they’re showing Batman Begins on an IMAX screen with the whole works, 12,000 watt surround sound, bignum foot tall screen, and it’s not 3-D, it’s just the normal movie done in an IMAX format.

It was great. I don’t know how it looked on a normal screen, but in IMAX it was incredible, and the sound was fantastic. Have they been showing normal movies on IMAX for a while, because if they have I’ve been missing something. This was an experience you couldn’t duplicate in your home theater or in one of those googolplex shoeboxes.

This is what movie theaters need to do to compete against DVD’s. They have to step it up a notch and provide a order of magnitude difference.

2

I saw it on an IMAX screen in the Kansas City area. AMC had taken one of the larger theaters in one of their mega-multi-plexes and converted it to IMAX. “Batman Begins” was the first movie they showed, but they were planning IMAX versions of other films as well. (“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” was on deck after Batman.) I had already seen Batman on a regular screen and the IMAX experience was definitely worth the extra cash (about four dollars more for a matinee show).

3

I saw Batman Begins in both IMAX and a regular movie theater. The difference was nothing short of phenomenal. We definitely need to see more major-release movies in IMAX. And naturally more IMAX theaters to go with that.

4

Did it have a really square picture?

Then it’s not in the Imax format.
Batman Begins, Polar Express and many others have been shown in IMAX theatres but they are not IMAX movies. It’s still a 35mm print. It is actually what is called a Drive In print. It is a little more “bright” than a regular print. When I worked at the Lincoln Square theatre in NYC, which has an IMAX screen, we thought ti would be a good idea to install a 35mm projector and then have an extra print for an additional midnight show. I saw Titanic this way and I saw Polar Express in 3D this way. But they were 35mm prints.

Now the sound is really great in an IMAX house. The system is better and the theatre is constructed more like a concert hall than a box.

5

Finally! A thread in my area of expertise! (Full-time IMAX journalist, here. Really.)

Sorry, Zebra, you’re mistaken. Although some IMAX theaters have shown 35mm prints of other films, that practice has almost completely ended, and Batman Begins and Polar Express were shown in the IMAX format at dozens of IMAX theaters around the world. (However, they were not originated in that format, as traditional giant-screen films, like Everest, were.

About three years ago Imax Corp. began offering a process it calls DMR (for Digital Re-Mastering–yes, I know they mixed it up) in which they scan the 35mm original film and, with some very sophisticated degraining and image enhancement software, improve the picture and print it out to their large format 70mm film. (Don’t be fooled by the relative gauges of the film: the IMAX frame is about 10 times larger than a 35mm frame, not merely two or four times.) At the same time the sound is remixed for the 6-channel digital IMAX sound systems.

They’ve done the following films so far:
Apollo 13
Star Wars, Episode 2
Matrix Reloaded
Matrix Revolutions
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Spider-Man 2
Polar Express (3D)
Robots
Batman Begins
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Coming in November: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

The comments from posters here are basically what the company has in mind: distinguishing their customers’ theaters from those of their competitors.

I’m interested to read Shoeless’ comments, because the AMC IMAX is one of the first to use a new projection system called MPX, designed for multiplex theaters. Somewhat paradoxically, it is intended for smaller theaters, allowing multilplex operators to put IMAX in existing theaters (as in KC) without having to build the much more expensive auditoriums with screens up to eighty feet tall. I’d be interested in knowing if you’ve been to the IMAX theater at the K.C. Zoo or the Iwerks (an IMAX competitor) theater at Union Station, and if so, how they compared to the AMC’s theater.

Imax Corp. is the only company converting Hollywood films to the giant screen now, but for a few years Disney was doing it, too. They started with Fantasia/2000 in 2000, and for the next few years Disney converted (in-house, with their own process, not Imax’s DMR), Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, and Treasure Planet. Fantasia/2000 grossed $75 million in 75 theaters in four months (unprecedented by IMAX standards), but Beauty only did about half that, Lion King half of that, and no one wants to talk about Treasure Planet. Before 9/11, there had been plans to convert Aladdin, and Tarzan was reportedly mostly done when Disney pulled the plug on further giant-screen re-releases.

Of the IMAX DMR films, the biggest so far was Polar Express, which was also the first to be converted to 3D exclusively for IMAX presentation. This was technically feasible because the computer animation of the original was modelled in 3D, so generating the second “eye” view was, if not trivial, simpler than trying to convert a live action 2D film to 3D. (Imax and other companies are working on that technology.)

The big issue facing Imax, and our whole industry, is digital 3D. This fall, 100 theaters in the top 25 US markets will show the animated film Chicken Little in digital 3D. Although the screens won’t be as big as traditional IMAX screens (although they will be about the same size as some of the MPX screens), they will be offering a high-quality 3D experience that is likely to be very popular.

Several companies now are saying that over the next year or two they will be equipping thousands of theaters with digital 3D projectors and converting Hollywood films to 3D. Considering that these systems will cost roughly a quarter to a third the price of the least expensive IMAX system, such developments are bound to have an impact on the company and the business.

However, Imax continues to announce new DMR releases, and has said that in 2006 they will release the first live-action film converted to IMAX 3D.

6

Thanks for the info.

Still, there is a huge difference between shot and 35mm and converted to ‘IMAX’ and films shot in IMAX. IMHO they don’t need 3D as the image is so large and clear that it looks 3D anyway.

7

Actually if you’ve seen an IMAX 3-D film, you’d certainly see that there is a significant different. “Up close” and “3-D” are not the same thing.

One thing commasense didn’t mention, though, is that with the DMR system, the film’s original aspect ratio does change (at least for the films I’ve seen), so the image is still more square-like (as is typical of IMAX), and information has been cropped off the image from the Flat/Scope 35mm original.

8

Actually, there has been some variety in how Imax has handled the aspect ratio issue.

With the first film, Apollo 13, they actually went back to the original full 35mm frame, and “restored” portions of the image at the top and bottom that had been cut off for the 35mm theatrical release. This had the effect of fitting the IMAX frame almost completely and not requiring quite as much of a blow up.

AFAIK, none of the subsequent DMR releases has used the full height of the IMAX screen. Star Wars, Episode II was shot digitally at 1.78, and the DMR print had black bars top and bottom. The bar at the bottom was made relatively small, so most of the black was at the top of the screen, where it wasn’t as obvious.

Similarly for the rest, some of which were released in Scope (2.25) versions, either they filled the width of the screen and put fairly significant bars top and bottom (e.g. Spider-Man 2, IIRC) or they cropped just a little on the sides to make the picture slightly taller.

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Clones, like all the SW films, in in Scope (2.35), and there was significant cropping off the sides in the IMAX presentation I saw (though I can’t recall if there were additional black bars).

10

I finally got around to seeing Batman Begins in IMAX. Unfortunately I was unimpressed.
The sound and picture quality were as promised, however it was not a very good film choice to convert.
If anyone has seen the film you know that the editing made very choppy sequences and the film-maker used very close tight shots of the action. It didn’t really gain anything by being enlarged.
On the other hand I did see Spiderman 2 and that was a whole different story.
The director used the camera to convey movement and arranged some nice scenic shots and detailed sets that were eye-candy when enlarged. And swinging from building to building was a dizzying effect.
As for IMAX 3-D, I find this to be the best trip for your dollar. I saw NASCAR 3-D and even if your not into racing it put you right on the racetrack. The depth was conveyed so well I found it amazing.

11

I was about to fire off a haughty post correcting you, but on checking my own reporting from the time, I find that you’re right and my post above was wrong.

Lucas shot Ep. 2 with an HD (1920x1080p) camera, which yielded a native 1.78 image, but he only used 817 pixels of the vertical to get the 2.35 ratio. I was thinking that the DMR edition used the full 1080 (i.e. more at the top and bottom than the 35mm release), but I see from my own October 2002 article that Imax started with the 1920x817 version and cropped the sides to about a 1.78 ratio.

Unlike the case of Apollo 13, in which the editing and post work was done on the full-frame image, which served as a home video and TV edition and was cropped to 2.35 for theatrical release, on Ep. 2 the extra height in the image was discarded too early in post to let Imax use it. The 2.35 version was the only one available.

Thanks for the correction, ArchiveGuy.

I’m pretty sure that many of the subsequent DMR releases have displayed the full 2.35 width, cropping little or nothing from the sides.

(BTW, my reference to Scope=2.25 above was a typo. I meant 2.35.)

12

I suspect you’re right. Ep2 struck me as particularly claustrophobic–an impression I don’t recall on the (few) other feature-film/IMAX presentations I’ve seen.