70 mm film (or65 mm film) is a wide high-resolutionfilm gauge for motion picture photography, with a negative area nearly 3.5 times as large as the standard35 mmmotion picture film format.[1] As used in cameras, the film is 65 mm (2.6 in) wide. For projection, the original 65 mm film is printed on 70 mm (2.8 in) film. The additional 5 mm contains the fourmagnetic stripes, holding six tracks of stereophonic sound. Although later 70 mm prints use digital sound encoding (specifically theDTS format), the vast majority of existing and surviving 70 mm prints pre-date this technology.
Each frame is fiveperforations tall (i.e., 23.8125 mm or 15/16 inches tall), with an imageaspect ratio of 2.2:1.[2] The use ofanamorphicUltra Panavision 70 lenses squeezes an ultra-wide 2.76:1 aspect ratio horizontally into that 2.2:1 imaging area. To this day, Ultra Panavision 70 produces the widest picture size in the history of filmmaking; surpassed only byPolyvision, which was only used for 1927'sNapoléon.
With regard to exhibition, 70 mm film was always considered a specialty format reserved forepics and spectacle films shot on 65 mm andblockbuster films that were released both in35 mm and as 70 mm blow-ups. While few venues were equipped to screen this special format, at the height of its popularity most major markets and cities had a theater that could screen it.[3] Some venues continue to screen 70 mm to this day or have even had 70 mm projectors permanently or temporarily installed for more recent 70 mm releases.[4]
Films formatted with a width of 70 mm have existed since the early days of the motion picture industry. The first 70 mm format film was most likely footage of theHenley Regatta, which was projected in 1896 and 1897, but may have been filmed as early as 1894. It required a specially built projector built byHerman Casler inCanastota, New York and had a ratio similar to full frame, with an aperture of 2.75 inches (70 mm) by 2 inches (51 mm). There were also several film formats of various sizes from 50 to 68 mm which were developed from 1884 onwards, includingCinéorama (not to be confused with the entirely distinct "Cinerama" format), started in 1900 byRaoul Grimoin-Sanson. In 1914 the ItalianFiloteo Alberini invented a panoramic film system utilising a 70 mm wide film called Panoramica.[5]
In 1928, William Fox of theFox Film Corporation, in personal partnership with Theodore Case as the Fox-Case Corporation, began working on a wide film format using 70 mm film which they namedGrandeur. Cameras were ordered by Fox-Case from Mitchell Camera Corp, with the first 70 mm production cameras, designated as the Mitchell Model FC camera, delivered to Fox-Case in May 1929. This was one of a number of wide-film processes developed by some of the major film studios at about that time. However, due to the financial strains of the Great Depression, along with strong resistance from movie theater owners, who were in the process of equipping their theaters for sound, none of these systems became commercially successful. Fox dropped Grandeur in 1930.[6]
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ProducerMike Todd had been one of the founders ofCinerama, a wide-screen movie process that was launched in 1952. Cinerama employed three 35 mm film projectors running in synchronism to project a wide (2.6:1) image onto a deeply curved screen. Although the results were impressive, the system was expensive, cumbersome and had some serious shortcomings due to the need to match up three separate projected images. Todd left the company to develop a system of his own which, he hoped, would be as impressive as Cinerama, yet be simpler and cheaper and avoid the problems associated with three-strip projection; in his own words, he wanted "Cinerama out of one hole".
In collaboration with theAmerican Optical Company, Todd developed a system which was to be called "Todd-AO". This uses a single 70 mm wide film and was introduced with the filmOklahoma! in October 1955. The 70 mm film is perforated at the same pitch (0.187 inch, 4.75 mm) as standard 35 mm film. With a five-perforation pull-down, the Todd-AO system provides a frame dimension of 1.912 inch (48.56 mm) by 0.87 inch (22.09 mm) giving an aspect ratio of 2.2:1.
The original version of Todd-AO used a frame rate of 30 per second, 25% faster than the 24 frames per second that was (and is) the standard; this was changed after the second film –Around the World in 80 Days - because of the need to produce (24 frame/sec) 35 mm reduction prints from the Todd-AO 65 mm negative. The Todd-AO format was originally intended to use a deeply curved Cinerama-type screen but this failed to survive beyond the first few films.[7] However, in the 1960s and 70s, such films asThe Sound of Music (which had been filmed in Todd-AO) andPatton (which had been filmed in a copycat process known as Dimension 150) were shown in some Cinerama cinemas, which allowed for deeply curved screens.[8]
Todd-AO adopted a similar multi-channel magnetic sound system to the one developed forCinemascope two years earlier, recorded on "stripes" of magnetic oxide deposited on the film. However Todd-AO has six channels instead of the four of Cinemascope and due to the wider stripes and faster film speed provides superior audio quality. Five of these six channels are fed to five speakers spaced behind the screen, and the sixth is fed to surround speakers around the walls of the auditorium.
Panavision developed their own 65/70 mm system that was technically compatible and virtually identical to Todd-AO. Monikered asSuper Panavision 70, it used spherical lenses and the same 2.2:1 aspect ratio at 24 frames per second. Panavision also had another 65 mm system,Ultra Panavision 70, which sprang from theMGM Camera 65 system they helped develop for MGM that was used to filmRaintree County andBen-Hur. Both Ultra Panavision 70 and MGM Camera 65 employed an anamorphic lens with a 1.25x squeeze on a 65 mm negative (as opposed to 35 mmCinemaScope which used a 2× compression, or 8-perf, horizontally filmed 35 mmTechnirama which used a 1.5× compression). When projected on a 70 mm print, a 1.25× anamorphic projection lens was used to decompress the image to an aspect ratio of 2.76:1, one of the widest ever used in commercial cinema.
Due to the high cost of 70 mm film and the expensive projection system and screen required to use the stock, distribution for films using the stock was limited, although this did not always hurt profits. Most 70 mm films were also released on35 mm film for a wider distribution after the initial debut of the film.South Pacific (1958),Lawrence of Arabia (1962),My Fair Lady (1964), andThe Sound of Music (1965) are well-known films widely shown in 70 mm format with a general release in 35 mm format. 70 mm film received a brief resurgence in the 1980s when it became popular to make "blow-up" prints of35 mm titles. It had another resurgence in the mid-2010s with the release ofThe Master (2012),The Hateful Eight (2015) andDunkirk (2017), with a small number of venues getting temporary or permanent 70 mm film projectors in order to be able to screen these titles.[4]Quentin Tarantino, in particular, led a successful campaign to have the equipment required to showThe Hateful Eight inUltra Panavision installed in 100 cinemas worldwide.[9]
The 35 mm to 70 mm "blow-up" process produces 70 mm release prints from 35 mm negatives, so that films shot on the smaller format could benefit from 70 mm image and sound quality. This process began in the 1960s with titles likeThe Cardinal (1963)[10] and continues up until the present day, with the height of its popularity being in the 1980s. These enlargements often provided richer colors, and a brighter, steadier and sharper (though often grainier) image, but the main benefit was the ability to provide 6-channel stereophonic sound as most theaters before the mid-70s (before the advent ofDolby A) were screening 35 mm prints with single channelmonaural sound.[1] However these "blow-ups" rarely used the full six channels of theTodd-AO system and instead used the four-track mixes made for 35 mm prints, the additional half-left and half-right speakers of theTodd-AO layout being fed with a simple mix of the signals intended for the adjacent speakers (known as a "spread") or simply left blank.[11] If a 70 mm film was shown in a Cinerama theatre, theCinerama sound system was used. From 1976 onwards, many 70 mm prints used Dolby noise reduction on the magnetic tracks but Dolby disapproved of the "spread" and instead re-allocated the 6 available tracks to provide for left, center and right screen channels, left and right surround channels plus a "low-frequency enhancement" channel to give more body to low-frequency bass.[12] This layout came to be known as "5.1" (the "point one" is the low-frequency enhancement channel) and was subsequently adopted for digital sound systems used with 35 mm.
In the 1980s the use of these "blow-ups" increased with large numbers of 70 mm prints being made of some blockbusters of the period such as the 125 70 mm prints made ofThe Empire Strikes Back (1980).[11] However the early 1990s saw the advent of digital sound systems (Dolby Digital,DTS andSDDS) for 35 mm prints which meant that 35 mm could finally match 70 mm for sound quality but at a far lower cost. Coupled with the rise of the multiplex cinema, which meant that audiences were increasingly seeing films on relatively small screens rather than the giant screens of the old "Picture Palaces", this meant that the expensive 70 mm format went out of favour again. TheDTS digital sound-on-disc system was adapted for use with 70 mm film, thus saving the significant costs of magnetic striping, but this has not been enough to stop the decline, and 70 mm prints were rarely made.
Among some of the more recent 70 mm blow-up titles arePaul Thomas Anderson'sInherent Vice (2014)[1] andPhantom Thread (2017),Patty Jenkins'sWonder Woman (2017),[13] andSteven Spielberg'sReady Player One (2018).[14]
In the late 20th century, the usage of 65 mm negative film drastically reduced, in part due to the high cost of 65 mm raw stock and processing. Some of the few films since 1990 shot entirely on 65 mm stock areKenneth Branagh'sHamlet (1996),Ron Fricke'sBaraka (1992) and its sequel,Samsara (2011),Paul Thomas Anderson'sThe Master (2012),Quentin Tarantino'sThe Hateful Eight (2015),Christopher Nolan'sDunkirk (2017) (almost 80 minutes, about 75% of the film was shot on 65 mm IMAX film, while the rest was shot on regular 65mm film),Kenneth Branagh'sMurder on the Orient Express (2017),Tenet (2020), andOppenheimer (2023). Other films used 65 mm cameras sparingly, for selected scenes or special effects. Films with limited 65 mm footage includeTerrence Malick'sThe New World (2005), thePatty Jenkins filmWonder Woman 1984 (2020),Cary Joji Fukunaga'sNo Time to Die (2021) and the Christopher Nolan filmsThe Dark Knight (featured 28 minutes of IMAX footage),Inception,[15]The Dark Knight Rises (over an hour in IMAX) andInterstellar.
Since the 2010s, most movie theaters have converted to digital projection systems, resulting in the removal of both 35 mm (the previous industry standard) projectors and 70 mm projectors.[16] However some venues and organizations remain committed to screening 70 mm film, seeing the special format as something that can set them apart and be an audience draw in an industry where most movies are screened digitally.[17]
70 mm film festivals continue to take place regularly at venues such asThe Somerville Theatre in Somerville, Massachusetts,[18] TheMusic Box Theatre in Chicago,[19] theHollywood Theatre in Portland, Oregon,[20] theAmerican Cinematheque's Aero and Egyptian Theaters in Los Angeles,[21] theMuseum of the Moving Image in New York City,[22] theTIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto,[3] theWorcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts,[23] and others.
Ananamorphic squeeze combined with 65 mm film allowed for extremely wide aspect ratios to be used while still preserving quality. This was used in the 1957 filmRaintree County and to incredible success in the 1959 filmBen-Hur and the 2015 filmThe Hateful Eight, both of which were filmed with the Ultra Panavision 70/MGM Camera 65 process at an aspect ratio of 2.76:1. It required the use of a 1.25x anamorphic lens to horizontally compress the image, and a corresponding lens on the projector to uncompress it.
Limited use of 65 mm film was revived in the late 1970s for some of the visual effects sequences in films likeClose Encounters of the Third Kind, mainly because the larger negative did a better job than 35 mm negative of minimizing visible film grain during opticalcompositing. 65 mm was the primary film format used at VFX pioneerDouglas Trumbull's facility EEG (Entertainment Effects Group), which later becameBoss Film Studios, run by formerIndustrial Light & Magic alumRichard Edlund. Since the 1990s, a handful of films (such asSpider-Man 2) have used 65mm for this purpose, but the usage ofdigital intermediate for compositing has largely negated these issues. Digital intermediate offers other benefits such as lower cost and a greater range of available lenses and accessories to ensure a consistent look to the footage.
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Ahorizontal variant of 70 mm, with an even bigger picture area, is used for the high-performance IMAX format which uses a frame that is 15 perforations wide on 70 mm film. The Dynavision and Astrovision systems each use slightly less film per frame andvertical pulldown to save print costs while being able to project onto an IMAX screen. Both were rare, with Astrovision largely used in Japaneseplanetariums. IMAX introduced a digital projection system in the late 2000s and most IMAX venues have migrated to a digital setup.[24]
The first commercial introduction of 70 mm single projector 3D was the 1967 release ofCon la muerte a la espalda, a Spanish/French/Italian co-production which used a process called Hi-Fi Stereo 70, itself based on a simplified, earlier developed Soviet process called Stereo-70. This process captured two anamorphic images, one for each eye, side by side on 65 mm film. A special lens on a 70 mm projector added polarization and merged the two images on the screen. The 1971 re-release ofWarner Bros.'House of Wax used the side-by-side StereoVision format and was distributed in both anamorphically squeezed 35 mm and deluxe non-anamorphic 70 mm form. The system was developed byAllan Silliphant andChris Condon of StereoVision International Inc., which handled all technical and marketing aspects on a five-year special-royalty basis with Warner Bros. The big screen 3D image was both bright and clear, with all the former sync and brightness problems of traditional dual 35 mm 3D eliminated. Still, it took many years more before IMAX began to test the water for big-screen 3D, and sold the concept to Hollywood executives.
Hollywood has released films shot on 35 mm as IMAX blow-up versions. Many 3D films were shown in the 70 mm IMAX format.The Polar Express in IMAX 3D 70 mm earned 14 times as much, per screen, as the simultaneous 2D 35 mm release of that film in the fall of 2004.
Same as Standard 65 mm except
Same as Standard 65 mm except
Same as IMAX except
same as standard 65/70 except:
Omnivision started inSarasota, Florida. Theatres were designed to compete with Omnimax but with much lower startup and operating costs. Most theatres were built in fabric domed structures designed by Seaman Corporation. The last known OmniVision theatres to exist in USA are The Alaska Experience Theatre inAnchorage, Alaska, built in 1981 (closed in 2007, reopened in 2008), and the Hawaii Experience Theatre inLahaina, Hawaii (closed in 2004).Rainbow's End (theme park) in NZ had the only remaining permanent Cinema 180 attraction until May 2015 when it was demolished.
One of the few producers of 70 mm films for Cinema 180 was the German company Cinevision (today AKPservices GmbH, Paderborn).
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