The Dark Séance: The Triumphant Return of Blubberscope

“Inspired by 3-D and CinemaScope, new technical innovations were developed at an astounding rate,” writes Mark Thomas McGee in his book Beyond Ballyhoo, “hardly a difficult task since, as often as not, these ‘innovations’ were nothing more than a fancy name.”

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We’ve written about many of them here before, and quoted Ray Harryhausen, who described them as follows: “I kept reading in the paper about all these people with different processes, which were absolutely nothing – wide screen, narrow screen, upside down screen, Blubberscope, whatever…”

From Harryhausen’s quote, “Blubberscope” has become my go-to word to categorize these sorts of gimmicks that are mostly there to add a few extra bucks onto the ticket price with the promise that what you’ll be seeing is somehow better than if you’d watched the same movie on a cheaper screen without the addition of whatever new Blubberscope the studio is peddling.

Some of these Blubberscopes caught on, while others remained just that. Prior to 1953, most movies were shown in a standard 1.33:1 aspect ratio, making something that looks more like a square than the modern widescreen formats that we’re all used to. You can still see it when watching a lot of movies from the 30s and 40s. For those later widescreen formats, we can largely thank Spyros Skouras, who was then head of 20th Century Fox.

Movies were competing with television in the 1950s, and studios had been dealt two huge blows by the Supreme Court, who effectively shut down their ability to own movie theaters or TV stations. “It was like telling McDonalds they could make burgers but not sell them,” McGee writes.

Many of our classic film gimmicks come from an attempt to make going to the movies more attractive than staying home and watching TV – a battle that is still being fought today, though the battlefield has shifted considerably in the intervening years.

Among these was CinemaScope, which Skouras and 20th Century Fox put all their chips into. It wasn’t the first attempt at making widescreen movies – as far back as 1927, the climax of Abel Gance’s Napoleon famously used “Polyvision,” which involved three screens placed side by side and three projectors running in sync – but it was one of the biggest. In 1953, Henry Koster’s Biblical epic The Robe opened with posters announcing it as “The First Motion Picture in CinemaScope,” in letters almost as big as the title.

When The Robe premiered, it set box office records, and the president of RKO theaters wrote a letter to Skouras, saying that CinemaScope would open “wonderful new vistas for the motion picture industry.” It certainly left its mark, one that we can still see in the massively widescreen flicks that we watch today. It was also far from the last such technical innovation that would attempt to part audiences with their hard-earned dollars with the promise of a more dramatic and immersive viewing experience.

Today, the prestige format du jour is IMAX, which began in the 1970s as a vessel primarily for nature documentaries, travelogues, educational films, and the like. At Expo ’74, Spokane, Washington hosted what was not quite the premier of IMAX, but may as well have been, projected onto what was then the biggest movie screen in the world – some 65 feet tall and 90 feet wide.

My first exposure to IMAX was at the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, KS, where I watched the usual kinds of early IMAX documentary films on a domed ceiling during school field trips. What is now known as the Carey Digital Dome Theater upgraded from IMAX to a new 4K digital projection system in 2012.

In the meantime, however, IMAX has gone into the business of regular movies. In 2008, IMAX began spreading into traditional theaters with the introduction of a lower-cost system that used a 1.90:1 aspect ratio, allowing multiplexes to convert certain screens to IMAX. Several popular directors have become proponents of the IMAX system, with Christopher Nolan being perhaps its most vocal champion – in 2024, Nolan’s Oppenheimer became the first film shot using IMAX equipment to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

Today, there are nearly 2,000 IMAX theaters worldwide, though only a tiny handful of them are actually capable of projecting 70 mm film at the resolution that the format originally promised. Still, IMAX has become the most popular upcharge for cinema patrons who want to get the most impressive bang for their moviegoing buck – which has recently put Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe into a bit of a bind, bringing us to the actual subject of our column this month.

Later this year, Marvel is rolling out two big movies on their path toward putting a cap on Phase 6 of the MCU, an entertainment juggernaut that has – for good or ill – dominated box offices for more than a decade now. The first of these is a rerelease of 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, with newly-added footage to tie it into the MCU’s current overarching storyline. The second is Avengers: Doomsday, which is set to release on December 18, 2026.

There’s just one problem: According to reporting from Kotaku, Dune 3, which also hits theaters on December 18, has already booked all the IMAX screens. So, what’s a would-be blockbuster to do? Return to the grand old tradition of Blubberscope!

To this end, “Disney has unveiled ‘Infinity Vision,’ a new theater-going experience that will be certain to transform your pedestrian $15 night out into an exotic $43 one.” Just what is “Infinity Vision?” In true Blubberscope fashion, nobody really knows. “Light on specifics, Disney says it will be certifying premium large-format theaters for the Infinity Vision experience, highlighting laser projection and immersive audio quality,” according to Kotaku.

A statement from Disney’s head of distribution doesn’t say a whole lot more. “Disney’s standards for production quality are second to none,” claims a press release, “with every single detail of a film finely tuned for an immersive experience. Infinity Vision certification extends that commitment to the theaters themselves, representing a shared effort between The Walt Disney Studios and the exhibition community to help audiences quickly find the very best screens in their area and experience our films in exactly the way they’re designed to be seen – on a huge screen with the sharpest, clearest color and sound.”

The press release goes on to say that, “Infinity Vision marks a major step forward in unifying premium theatrical standards and reinforcing the value of the big-screen experience for audiences worldwide.”

What does all of that mean? We’ll have to wait for the September re-release of Endgame to find out, but probably not much more than an extra surcharge on your ticket price. Still, it sounds almost exactly like the language that Spyros Skouras used to sell viewers and exhibitors on CinemaScope back in the day, when he argued that Fox’s investment in CinemaScope was an attempt to “save the industry,” rather than simply line their own pockets.

And who knows… maybe it was a bit of both?