Before Twilight, Summit Entertainment was a small studio you never heard of; Open Road is hoping to follow the same path. The distribution company founded by AMC and Regal Theaters has acquired Stephenie Meyer’s The Host, which has Saoirse Ronan already lined up as star in a dual-role. Andrew Niccol is set to direct. Twi-hards, get excited! [Deadline]
Boston Globe film critic Ty Burr confirms what you may have already noticed at your local chain multiplex: picture quality sucks, and an unspoken company cost-cutting policy is to blame. Thanks to a perfect storm of practices uncovered at an AMC Loews in Boston, endemic to the company and other chains — going cheap on projection, sweetheart deals with Sony, sheer laziness — ticket buyers are getting shafted at 2-D screenings dimmed by 50 to 85 percent brightness.
According to the report, the issue affects AMC, National Amusement, and Regal Theaters, and comes down to a single piece of equipment: The add-on 3-D lens attached to Sony 4K digital projectors, which creates the 3-D image projected onto a theater screen. Those 3-D lenses must be removed for subsequent screenings of 2-D films, or the image is dimmed considerably. And for a few reasons — none of them good — this necessary step is not being taken.
At fault: Theater management, who are allegedly cutting costs by simply not making the switch, which requires specialized training (read: minimum wage-earning theater employees can’t just push a button on the Sony set-ups as they might to just run a film). [Add to that the fact that other projection systems make the switch from 3-D to 2-D literally as easy as turning the filter on and off with a button, as a projectionist source describes to Movieline.] The Globe quotes a local projectionist in pinpointing where the decision not to remove the Sony projector lens filters originates:
“I can tell you who’s not [making the call], and it’s not the manager,” said one projectionist who has worked at a number of area theaters, including the Common, and
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