One Battle After Another Filmed in VistaVision

[Terry Monohan]

Our movie group watched the first showing today of 'One Battle After Another' Thursday Sept 25 at the 2:30PM DCP release on the large semi curved screen at Cinelux Capitola Theatre in Capitola CA near Santa Cruz.

No special 'VistaVision' or 70mm projectors around this area so we just watched in DCP. The image had very crisp focus and clear color even though just the middle 1.85 of the screen was up. The stereo sound mix was very hot. They used the split surround speakers very niceley. The outdoor chase up and down road segments came out very tense. People lucky enough to watch 'One Batlle' with VistaVision projectors are in for a treat. The 70mm blowups will probably stand out also.

What was so strange as with many new films the main title does not come up on the screen till many minutes in. They have the Warner Bros logo at the start but no mention of 'FILMED IN VISTA VISION' These words only show up twice in small print on the end title credits when most people have left their seats. I wonder if Paramount Studios still owns the 1954 logo and title rights 'VistaVision Motion Pitture High Fidelty' Such a shame Warner Bros brought out the old dusty side ways 'VistaVision' cameras to film this new Paul Thomas Anderson 'One Battle After Another' movie and did not hype it up at all at least on the opening of the film.

When I arrived in the lobby I asked as a joke just to see what the manager or two candy girls would say when I asked them If they were showing 'One Battle' on VistaVision projectors, They had no idea what I was talking about. Then I told them It was filmed in the old classic 'VistaVision' process.

Warner Bros could care less, did not promote much the 'VistaVision' shooting used in this new film with a fancy fanfare opening logo. I bet Quentin Tarantino whould have. Most of the public has no clue what 'VistaVision' is. No 'Vista' promotion used on how It was used in the filming or in the newspaper reviews that came out today. Some people must have noticed how clear the focus was. Let's hope when the Blu Ray/4K comes out they will put 'VistaVision' in big letters on the box cover or will they be afraid to promote it again.

The actors Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn along with Regina Hall will be up for awards at the Oscars next year.

A very long move starts out a little slow but builds up. They had a nice crowd for the first showing today in theatre Film-Tech Forums that is a good sign for weekend boxoffice business.

[Jim Cassedy]

What was so strange as with many new films the main
title does not come up on the screen till many minutes in.

According to the DTS time code on the 70mm print here, the
main title doesn't pop up until 12:45, give or take a few seconds.

[Harold Hallikainen]

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/26/m...stavision.html

‘One Battle After Another’ Is in VistaVision. Should You Care?


Filmmakers are giving a format that hasn’t been popular since the 1950s another try.
By Brian Josephs

Sept. 26, 2025

The brand that’s often associated with the sort of high-quality pictures that people go to the movies for is IMAX. The name pops up in the promotional materials for “One Battle After Another,” the new film from Paul Thomas Anderson. Far less common is the inclusion of another filmmaking technology, VistaVision.

Although it will also be shown on IMAX screens and in several other formats, “One Battle After Another” is the latest film to be shot mainly in VistaVision, which uses larger film negatives for sharper quality. It follows use of the format in “The Brutalist,” the nearly four-hour period drama that earned its cinematographer, Lol Crawley, an Oscar.

“One Battle After Another” will also be projected in VistaVision in only four theaters around the world — in Boston, London, New York and Los Angeles — because very few are equipped to do so. (“The Brutalist” was shot in VistaVision but not projected in it.) Still, more VistaVision releases from major directors, including Yorgos Lanthimos, Greta Gerwig and Alejandro G. Iñárritu, are on the way, which may lead moviegoers to become acquainted with a technology that hadn’t been this popular since before Anderson was born. Here’s a breakdown of its long journey.

What is VistaVision?

VistaVision, created by Paramount Pictures in 1954, runs film stock through cameras horizontally, like photo and IMAX cameras, instead of vertically. The change results in a higher-resolution image and enhanced quality.
The format was used in dozens of films in the ’50s, including Cecil B. DeMille’s epic “The Ten Commandments” and the John Wayne western “The Searchers.” Alfred Hitchcock was one of the VistaVision era’s most prolific directors, using it to shoot five films, including “Vertigo” and “North by Northwest.” Why was it invented?

By the 1950s, studio executives were fretting about an ascendant new technology called television. The number of households with a set increased from fewer than 6,000 in 1941 to nearly 10 million by 1950, while the weekly admissions for movies tumbled by 20 million from 1946 to 1950. Studios tried to home in on what movie screens could offer that a living room couldn’t.

Their answer at first was to go larger: Cinerama, introduced in the early 1950s, was so wide that it needed three projectors running at the same time to screen a film, and 20th Century Fox’s CinemaScope, arriving in 1953, offered a more manageable width that was still greater than the standard display. VistaVision was the narrowest of the three, and its advantages, according to a Times article, included “the fact that it can be projected on standard-size or outsize screens without a notable loss of pictorial quality.”

The high fidelity of VistaVision seemed to be apparent when Paramount released the first VistaVision feature, “White Christmas,” in 1954.

“The colors on the big screen are rich and luminous,” the Times critic Bosley Crowther wrote in his review, “the images are clear and sharp, and rapid movements are got without blurring — or very little — such as sometimes is seen on other large screens.” Editors’ Picks

But the VistaVision cameras were cumbersome, noisy and ran through film faster. Soon film stock that could rival VistaVision’s quality was available, and the format’s time as Paramount’s main filmmaking tool ended after just seven years with the 1961 western “One-Eyed Jacks.”

Its use for special effects saved it from complete obsolescence. The original “Star Wars” used VistaVision because the larger image area could handle combined visual effects without a significant loss in quality. The format has since stuck around as a supporting player, used to shoot some scenes as recently as 2023 in the dark comedy “Poor Things.”

Who is using it and why?

Special effects weren’t quite the driving reason for its return to prominence in “The Brutalist.” For one, Crawley, the cinematographer, and the director Brady Corbet thought it was fitting to use technology from the 1950s for a film set in that period. The movie also focuses on architecture, and VistaVision was part of an effort to capture design details accurately without the distortion of wide lenses.

For “One Battle After Another,” the cinematographer Michael Bauman said in a phone interview that Anderson picked VistaVision in search of a raw look that was partly inspired by the 1971 thriller “The French Connection.” Bauman noted the camera still had drawbacks — “It’s like having a lawn mower on set,” he saidof its noisiness — but still lauded its film quality.

As for why VistaVision was being revived now, Bauman alluded to the challenges more than 70 years ago, when the core argument was that a TV set couldn’t give you the experience this format could deliver in a theater. In 2025, neither can streaming.
“In a world where everyone’s all about streaming, this is like, OK, here’s a reason to go back to the cinema,” Bauman said, “because this is an experience you’re just not going to get on your amazing 52-inch TV.”

A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 27, 2025, Section C, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: Another New Movie In Good Old VistaVision.

[Mark Ogden]

Things don't seem to be going well here. Reports are that on Friday at the Vista Theatre in LA there was an actual on-screen gate burn for the VV print, and also they lost a show midway thru at the Union Square in NYC when the projector died. On both occasions they switched to the DCP, but at the Union Square the aspect ratio somehow didn't match the VV print and some of the picture was overcut onto the masking.

I was going to see the VV print at the Coolidge Corner but I may try to catch a 70mm show now. All these guys with their obsolete formats, and it's still the same movie no mater how you see it. It's cool that VistaVision was resurrected and it would be great to see it, but still.

[Ryan Gallagher]

Things don't seem to be going well here. Reports are that on Friday at the Vista Theatre in LA there was an actual on-screen gate burn for the VV print, and also they lost a show midway thru at the Union Square in NYC when the projector died. On both occasions they switched to the DCP, but at the Union Square the aspect ratio somehow didn't match the VV print and some of the picture was overcut onto the masking.

I was going to see the VV print at the Coolidge Corner but I may try to catch a 70mm show now. All these guys with their obsolete formats, and it's still the same movie no mater how you see it. It's cool that VistaVision was resurrected and it would be great to see it, but still.

Sad to hear that. Some hard lessons out there! If I'm not mistaken VV has a reputation for not being easy on sprokets and intermittents due potentially higher mass at the intermittent sprocket, don't know if it has to pull harder but there is definitely more velocity and momentum involved. Others have said intermittent in VV had to be rebuilt frequently back in the day.

VistaVision probably just exaggerates all the best practices. Our 4p35mm and 5p70mm lensing is not a perfect match for our DCI setup either (where the screen use is maximized in Flat and a bit smaller for Scope to improve sight lines). But if one is gonna run digital backups it pays to take the extra time to land them in your analog masking (or have fully motorized masking that can change presets in the event you have to fail over). We run our backups on a 5 min delay, so there is a small amount of time to recover film before you should make a backup decision (or pause the backup to keep working). Have not had to use the backup yet in my 3 years at this venue, but I act like I'm going to have to every time. But I can't talk cause I'm not wrestling with high value VV prints on restored ancient mechanisms either and having that skew my priorities.

This is another reason we have 2 projectionists on film days... cause it can easily become a full head-space of work just making sure the preroll and DCP or BluRay backup is happy, let the other person concentrate on the actual print and screening as if it was their only task.

[Chris Haller]

I've heard multiple stories of film breaks, of projectors breaking down, and someone on reddit shared that a manger at The Vista said the, "print had flipped onto itself," which makes it sound like to me that the print was thrown????? Lots of stories from the first weekend of problems all over the Paul Thomas Anderson subreddit.

[Ryan Gallagher]

“Flipped onto itself” also reads like “folded back”, a wind tension issue and/or platter timing issue? Or even too much feed tension on a RtR feed clutch combined with loose winding?

[Jim Cassedy]

As I might have mentioned before, I've got a subscription to a very extensive newspaper
archive. It's quite expensive, but to me it's worth the cost of around $120/year. The other day
I was looking up some info that had nothing at all to do with cinema technology, and just by
chance, I came across this story published in the San Francisco Chronicle on March 3rd 1954:

VistaVsn_SFChron030354.jpg

[Mike Blakesley]

That movie looks interesting but it's flopping bigtime in the small towns. We aren't playing it, but our neighboring theater down the road (a town of 9500) had zero patrons for it on opening night, and less than 20 for the rest of the weekend.

[Martin McCaffery]

As I might have mentioned before, I've got a subscription to a very extensive newspaper
archive.

Newspapers.com, or is it something different? I use Newspapers.com, but would be interested in knowing of a different source.

[Harold Hallikainen]

"This large negative is then compressed to the standard 35 mm frame for release." Huh?

On ticket sales, it looks from the trailer that is is a shoot 'em up movie with car chases. Not my kind of movie. Looking at ticket sales for a local theater playing it, there are currently 353 seats available in a 370 seat auditorium for a showing tonight at 8:15 (5.5 hours from now).

[Ryan Gallagher]

"This large negative is then compressed to the standard 35 mm frame for release." Huh?

Depending on timing, SF may not have had a VV projector venue, but they were still marketing the camera tech as an improvement. The vast majority of VV films were never viewed in VV, only a handful of locations even back then.

[Harold Hallikainen]

Interesting! Did they adapt it to a standard 35 mm frame using an anamorphic lens, or just ran the VV aspect ratio on vertically running film (with a lot of black space between frames)? Or, I guess they could have just cropped it...

[Ryan Gallagher]

Interesting! Did they adapt it to a standard 35 mm frame using an anamorphic lens, or just ran the VV aspect ratio on vertically running film (with a lot of black space between frames)? Or, I guess they could have just cropped it...

I’m not the one to comment on all the timing of methods during the “widescreen wars”. But as VV was native 1.50:1 across more film area, it could be easily reduced and cropped to the formats that were considered “widescreen” at the time, namely 1.85 in the US and 1.66 in the UK, without losing detail relative to other methods. When presented in VV (even though that was rare and never took off) it would be superior to CinemaScope in detail, even if a wider presentation ratio was targeted.

[Jim Cassedy]

That movie looks interesting but it's flopping bigtime in the small towns.
We aren't playing it, but our neighboring theater down the road (a town of 9500) had
zero patrons for it on opening night, and less than 20 for the rest of the weekend.

Movie audiences are unpredictable, and, of course cultural tastes and entertainment preferences
vary greatly across a large nation like the US. "it's a free country", as they say.

At my venue, OBAA took in over $65k during last Fri-Sat-Sun (and that doesn't count the sold out
70mm advance studio premiere last Wed night, or the 5 shows on Thurs) We had it playing digitally
in a couple of auditoriums, but I'd guess at least 75% of that sales figure came from the 70mm shows,
all of which were pretty much sold out. - - UNTIL MONDAY! Attendance at the daytime shows has
dropped like a rock. We had less than 30ppl (in an auditorium that seats over 300) at the first show
today. I've heard rumors they may drop a show or two over the next couple of days. Advance ticket
sales show another reasonable weekend ahead, so I'm curious to see where this goes. I think we've
got a minimum 3 week commitment for the 70mm, "in our largest auditorium" no matter what.
(and dang. . . that's the only auditorium we have that will do 70mm, thank God, or they'd probably
try & have me running two shows at once! )