What one bad screening of 'The Hateful Eight' means for the future of film

What one bad screening of 'The Hateful Eight' means for the future of film
It's time to move on from film.
"From the moment the film began with the OVERTURE card depicting a horse-drawn carriage riding through snow in front of a stylized mountain range, Ennio Morricone's big lush score creeping in, there was a problem. The carriage was in the center of the screen, towards the lower third of the image, and right there, almost framing the carriage, was a soft-focus spot that kept dilating in and out of focus. The film played for two hours, until the intermission, and nothing changed. For the entire thing, that maddening focus issue continued. When the lights came up, I heard several people talking about it, puzzled why no one seemed to be doing anything about it. Eventually, someone announced that they would be showing the second half of the film via digital projection because the 70MM was no longer working. How embarrassing is that? You have this movie that is being sold in large part on the visual experience that only Ultra Panavision 70 can deliver. And on the night you're showing it to press that is going to be responsible for spreading the word about what an indispensable part of the experience the special 70MM projection is… it fails. And whether it's the fault of the theater or the projectionist, the studio is still responsible for making sure that the film they're screening is given the best possible chance to impress. Here's the really awful part, the thing that I feel bad writing: once they switched over to the digital projection, it looked better. And not just in that one out-of-focus spot, either. Robert Richardson has done some of the best work of his career while working with Tarantino, and looking at the film's second half, we were given a reference-copy look at Richardson's work. Because the 70MM lens was simply not working right, that overall softness could not communicate the rich burnished-leather look of the film. In the fuzzy first half, many of the details of Minnie's Haberdashery, the isolated mountain roadhouse where most of the film takes place, were lost in that vaguely focused background. In the second half, it felt like you could explore every corner of that amazing set, and it also brought all of those great faces into sharp focus. It really was night and day in all the most important ways."