In the age of high-resolution digital imagery, most folks have stopped caring about showing off the size of their televisions and how many pixels are crammed into them. What was once the most expensive category of television in stores, 4K TVs, are now all you can find and cheaper than ever. Yet when it comes to the movie theaters, the battle for the highest pixel count is still in full swing.
How Far We Have Come
When I was younger, I remember the sheer madness that ensued during Black Friday each season. Folks didn't realize it, but they were witnessing Moore's Law in real time through this beautifully debaucherous capitalist holiday. That is, transistors in integrated circuits doubling roughly every two years, which can be thought of as either the same performance in half the size or twice in the same size. So the screens on the TVs grew, the number of pixels grew, and those big backs on the TVs shrank.
Year after year, people would lose their minds to get the best deals and waste no time to show off their expensive spoils to their friends and family. In a weird way, it brought us together, made us hate the Joneses, but also enticed the industry to stay ahead of the curve. Soon enough, the lower-resolution TVs faded out of every living room. Interestingly enough, the fervor seemed to hit a fork in the road. Why might you ask?
Well, TV manufacturers still do make better TVs with higher pixel counts, and they certainly are more expensive, but the content we ingest is the true bottleneck. Since the age of physical media died, we must rely on the internet to watch what we love. Unfortunately, most of the nation's electrical infrastructure cannot handle the massive file size of content beyond 4K without massive buffer times. Furthermore, most streaming services don't even provide much content in 4K, where some big streaming services have less than 10% of their catalogs available in 4K.
So the TV manufacturers try new bells and whistles with things like HDR adjustments, so water looks neon blue and everyone looks like they have a spray tan, but these are in some cases subjective improvements and certainly not something the average person would be caught boasting about to their neighbor. Now they are resorting to using AI, and the like, to improve the user experience, but this still has its limits.
Regardless of this interesting, perhaps depressing, story arc as well as some global industry shake-ups like Covid, there is one vestige which has stood the test of time: movie theaters.
The IMAX Deception
Just like those cherished memories of old, visiting box stores at the peak of Black Friday bonanza, I also loved going to the movies. Whether it was to see each iteration of a series with lightsabers or wands, it was of the utmost importance to me to see it. In many ways, I felt a special bond with my family members who watched them with me and rewatched some with me during the holidays.
Skip to recent times, I was on a work trip and wanted to watch the second installment of a book-turned-movie by Frank Herbert and had heard a lot of buzz about seeing it in IMAX. So I did the most absolutely deplorable, but really why have I never done this before, thing of going to the movies solo. I thought I picked a halfway decent seat, and I soon learned it didn't really matter. The screen was so large, and the theater had what looked like hundreds of seats all with a great view of the screen. The screen appeared to extend all the way to the floor. It was insane and a pretty good movie too.
Later, I had heard that we have an IMAX screen in Bakersfield, so I went and checked it out. Not nearly as good a movie, but something was off. I won't sit here and lie to say that I was able to spot it, but I was just curious to investigate.
What I found was that there are only a small handful of IMAX theaters in the US, something like 20 or so. So you might be wondering... "Bakersfield is really on the up and up, having one of the only 20 IMAX theaters in the country." Unfortunately, the one we have in town is considered a Digital IMAX theater with a much smaller screen, and there are quite a few of these around. What some might refer to as the True IMAX theaters, showing 70mm film at a 1.43:1 aspect ratio, can reach resolutions up to 18K, and these theaters are fairly rare. One point of contention even with these superior IMAX films is yet another bottleneck of the content being displayed itself — ironic, huh. A majority of True IMAX movies tend to only have a handful of scenes actually shot with the fancy high-resolution cameras due to costs and the complexity involved in wielding such massive beasts. So even today and for how far we have come, there is still more to squeeze out whilst keeping Moore's Law in check.
If you are interested, California actually has quite a few of these theaters with a True IMAX screen, so if you are willing to travel to LA or the Bay, you too can be blown away by the visual elegance of the next upcoming IMAX movie.
The Pipedream
I have to imagine I was not the only one in their childhood who would go around the room with friends or family and pretend, "What would you do with a million dollars?" Well, cut to today, and sadly it wouldn't get you very far, and especially not in California. One hope that I still think is reasonable to hold onto, though, is for some other fellow human being, with Bakersfield in their heart, to feel a wave of capitalistic philanthropy wash over them.
We have some of the best of the best, all of whom originally hailed from or still do hail from the greater Bakersfield area. The list is endless, and it keeps growing every day and will continue until they claw this city from our bare hands, which I would not recommend. Nonetheless, the best of the best seem to overlap with smart entrepreneurship which tends to overlap with wanting to make more money.
So, as for the proposal, pipedream, or money-making idea, whatever you want to call it, and what you have sacrificed reading this half-baked post for.
If we build a True IMAX theater in Bakersfield, people all across the Central Valley will travel to this theater to see these movies and will pay top dollar just like they do in LA and the Bay. Now movie-goers, before you accuse me of putting words in your mouth, I think it is like 30 bucks for a ticket, and in my opinion it could be worse.
One might think, "Well, only making a profit on a theater doesn't quite seem worth it?" Well, I raise you, if someone must travel multiple hours to see a movie that could itself take a few hours to watch and then have to turn back around to travel another few hours to get back home seems highly likely, then I beg to differ. I think it is easier to assume they would just stay in a hotel for a night and get the heck out of Dodge post-brunch the next day. So not only will there be some boom from the theater, but it is reasonable to assume other nearby businesses could stand to benefit as well. Hell, you could build the whole strip mall that has the theater and see the benefits of that as well.
The movie business is near and dear to California, and it has proven itself to stand the test of time. So it is reasonable to assume it is still alive and well and here to stay. For instance, we are just a little over a month away now from one of the first IMAX movies to come out, which was filmed entirely with those fancy IMAX cameras I was referring to, and if I had to put my pretend million dollars on it, it won't be the last.
So, in closing, as an avid movie-goer and dreamer myself, if you build it, they will come!