Wonder Woman 1984

[Mitchell Dvoskin]

Wonder Woman 1984, Warner Brothers owes me two hours and 31 minutes of my life back. Give me a keyboard and mouse and some good editing software and I could make an almost entertaining 70 minute movie out this piece of crap.

I do have a question. The beginning and end of the film are 1.85, and the middle is 2.39. On HBO Max version they maintain constant width where they enlarged the 1.85 image to almost fill the 16:9 screen. On the theatrical version, do they maintain constant height so that the 1.85 sections have black bars on the sides?

[Geoff Jones]

I wasn't expecting much, so I didn't hate it the way many people seem to, but I agree it had a lot of problems. On the positive side, I like how they are handling Diana's character. As the father of two daughters, we need more kick-ass female superheroes. (My 16 year old thought it was dumb, but my 13 year old liked it okay.)

The aspect ratio nonsense was annoying. I have a constant-height projection set-up and a 2.39:1 screen. I use a zoom pre-set on my projector to make scope films bigger by projecting the black bars above and below the screen. When I watch 16:9 (or similar) content, I use a different pre-set that shrinks the image and leaves black columns on the sides. All of this makes scope movies bigger, not smaller, they way they were meant to be.

I assumed WW84 was scope, because WW and all of the WW84 trailers were scope, so I set my projector zoom to "scope." When the movie started, I was projecting part of the image onto the ceiling and the wall below the screen. I paused it immediately, changed the projector's zoom setting, and started over. Then, after the prologue, when the movie did change to scope, we were stuck watching the rest of it "windowboxed," with black all around the picture. I debated pausing it and changing the projector settings again, but pausing a movie interrupts the flow (see below), and for all I knew, it was going to jump back and forth between ratios later on.

Films like Superman, The Road Warrior, and Galaxy Quest know how to handle aspect ratio changes correctly.

(Yes, this problem is so tiny it doesn't even qualify as a first-world problem, but I figure this is the only place I can bitch about it where anyone will understand.)

And to make matters worse, the first few minutes looked terribly compressed until the streaming caught up, and the movie stopped three or four times to buffer, giving me a spinning "loading" circle, which resulted in another 30-60 seconds of terrible compression when it started up again.

All of that makes me miss (good) movie theaters. Sadly, I know I'm in the minority. Most people are happy to watch movies on their phones.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Wonder Woman 1984, Warner Brothers owes me two hours and 31 minutes of my life back. Give me a keyboard and mouse and some good editing software and I could make an almost entertaining 70 minute movie out this piece of crap.

I do have a question. The beginning and end of the film are 1.85, and the middle is 2.39. On HBO Max version they maintain constant width where they enlarged the 1.85 image to almost fill the 16:9 screen. On the theatrical version, do they maintain constant height so that the 1.85 sections have black bars on the sides?

The movie is probably already out there, in the open...

I can provide the keyboard and mouse. The free version of DaVinci Resolve should do the trick. So, I'm eagerly awaiting the Mitchell Dvoskin cut.

[Darryl Spicer]

At the theatre there are no format changes at the beginning or end. Everything stays in the 2.39 aspect ratio. The movie wasn't terrible, but I agree a lot could have been chopped out to speed up the pace of the movie.

[Mike Blakesley]

Usually after a movie, many people come out saying how great it was (if it was indeed great). This movie, I've had maybe four or five "good" comments but the vast majority of people have just walked out, meaning a lot of them didn't like it too well.

I suppose some were over-expecting, considering the hype and the delay on it. I wish it would have been really really good, because the negative reaction is going to make ticket sales drop fast and we're stuck with this thing for 3 weeks. It's going to be Tenet all over again. At least this time it's not as annoying to listen to.

The other irritating thing is, the media has already started with the "gross apparently wasn't affected by the simultaneous debut on HBO Max" articles so I'm sure the push will be intense for other studios to follow Warner Bros down the rat-hole of going day and date with streaming.

I haven't seen it myself yet so I can't comment too much on it. My wife wants to watch it but I have about zero interest.

[Frank Cox]

Are you getting many people out to see it, Mike?

I'm playing Wonder Woman next week and I sure hope it's going to do better than Monster Fighter, which is a complete dud here.

[Mike Blakesley]

It's doing pretty well, we've had a couple shows where we were as sold out as we could be. (around 50% capacity). The new Croods movie did better, which was a huge surprise but I guess the kids are sick of being stuck at home too.

Biggest problem we have is having to block seats for social distancing. The gov't says it's OK for us to have 70% capacity, but we have to block two seats on each side of a group. So our maximum is really somewhere between 50 and 60% depending on how many family groups we get vs. couples or singles.

[Frank Cox]

Theatres in Saskatchewan are allowed 30. Doesn't matter if your auditorium has 100 seats or 1000, you're allowed 30 customers.

It really hasn't affected me though, since I haven't had 30 people come to a show in months. Maybe Wonder Woman will get me the 30.

One of the good things about a theatre -- there's always hope that next week will be better.

[Marcel Birgelen]

I guess Warner Brothers has proven themselves that they simply can't reliably produce superhero movies. Maybe it's time to sell your DC licenses to someone else and move on?

Maybe a warning first: The rant below here contains potential spoilers.

Why did this movie need to go back to the beginning of Wonder Woman? Didn't we have an extensive introduction in the previous movie already?
Why do the only two big-budget releases of this very studio this year contain some "magic" thingamabob as a blatant MacGuffin? Is it really too much to ask for some characters with some real, more deeply rooted motivations other than trying to get the magic thingy before the other guy/girl does?
Gee, I wonder if they're going to kill off Chris Pine again in the next Wonder Woman, then he can be truly the Kenny of the series.

Can't wait for the 5 hours and 33 minutes director's cut of this turd of a movie!

[Frank Cox]

Just to be contrary, I'll say that I like it.

It's not anywhere near being a great movie, but as superhero jumping-around movies go, it's not bad. I like it better that quite a few of the other superhero movies that have come out over the past few years, anyway. I guess it's because the fight and action scenes don't make any effort to be realistic, but are presented in the exaggerated fashion of a cartoon. Hey, if you're going to suspend your disbelief you might as well suspend it all the way.

It's nowhere on my favourite movies list, but it's pretty good for what it's intended to be. They could have left out that first fifteen minutes or so, though. I guess they just wanted to pad out the runtime and create an excuse for more jumping around.

A movie like this would be a lot more impressive if it had been made pre-1990. Then we could be wowed by the spectacular visuals; now that we know it's just computer generated it's not nearly as special.

[Mike Blakesley]

I think you hit the nail on the head there, Frank. The CGI has wrecked the idea of the epic scenes because everybody knows it's all fake. At least when you watched the parting-the-Red-Sea scene in "The Ten Commandments" you knew it was fake but you wonder just how they did it -- plus they at least attempted to make it look as realistic as they could. These days you know how they did it --- software, and the notion of realism is completely gone.

This movie is hanging on very well for us, despite the negative reviews on it. The crowds have been very steady since Day 1, and there have been no early walk-outs, so maybe people are liking it better than early reviews indicated. (I still haven't watched it yet.)

[Marcel Birgelen]

It's good to hear that despite the relatively lukewarm reviews this movie seems to attract a crowd. Around here, all cinemas are still closed and missing this singular big-budget release hits pretty hard...

It's a pity how the overuse of CGI has made CGI itself look like it's just a bargain bin trick. Remember how we looked in awe at CGI-generated dinosaurs and when a new Terminator literally melted in front of our eyes?

It would be interesting to see how this movie would've done in a "normal" year, where it would've had to compete with other releases.

[Mike Blakesley]

I think it's kind of funny how in all superhereo movies featuring women, they show the female hero flying through the air at a breakneck speed, but their long hair waves as if being blown by a gentle breeze. Of course I guess in the Superman films, Chris Reeve's hair didn't move AT ALL even when he was going so fast he was reversing the planet's rotation.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Can't have women with a bad-hair-day on screen.
But I guess the explanation is that Wonder Woman's hair is made from vibranium spiked kryptonite.

Hair used to be one of the biggest challenges for proper chroma-keying in the past and still remains a challenge for modern-day green screen effects.

[Joseph L. Kleiman]

The prologue was filmed on 15 perf/65 mm film stock with IMAX cameras. In IMAX theaters using film and laser projection, those scenes exhibit at 1.43:1. On non-laser digital IMAX, they run at 1.90:1, which is what WB attempted to duplicate with the HBOmax screening (similar to some Christopher Nolan blu-rays from WB that shift aspect ratio between the 1570 and 570/435 shot scenes). For all non-IMAX theatrical runs, the aspect was maintained at 2.39:1 for the duration of the film.