Everybody has their own idea about what counts as an acceptable way to watch movies, and what crosses the line into near-offensively inappropriate. For most enthusiasts, the only acceptable methods of engagement are in the theater and in high-quality home theater systems. No small screens, no motion blurring, no tinny speakers, and no low-quality image quality are allowed, and there’s something to be said for the purity of this approach.
It’s also an approach that doesn’t work for everyone. Given that the enjoyment we get from watching movies is a subjective experience, it makes sense that different options can be just as desirable for some. Today, we want to explore just two of those, to see what they might offer, where they’ve proved themselves, and where they still might fall short.
What often gets lost in debates about viewing formats is the role of cinematic intent. Directors and cinematographers design each shot with careful consideration of scale, composition, and visual hierarchy. These choices behave differently depending on screen size, brightness, contrast, and viewing distance. While this has historically been used as an argument against smaller or unconventional displays, it also highlights how surprisingly adaptable films can be; many of the strongest visual ideas, silhouettes, color palettes, rhythmic editing, translate well across mediums when the underlying craftsmanship is solid.
Folding Phone Viewing
A key element of absorbing as much as you can from a film is how it affects your senses. This is why many of us have traditionally disregarded the idea of watching on phones, and it’s a trajectory that many of us hold today. This is reasonable, since the screens of the earliest smartphones were low-quality, and the speakers of even the best smartphones can’t match their larger TV or speaker cousins today. Of course, today is not the early 2010s.
As an example of how far we’ve come, consider the evolution seen in mobile in another form of mobile entertainment, online casino games. Slot games today, like Big Sumo and Buffalo King Megaways, have reached a point where they’re just as playable on smartphones and tablets as they are on desktops and laptops. The technology now makes loading, navigation, and engagement that much better, and folding phones bring this same potential to watching movies.
As hard as this might be to imagine, we can prove it through a simple experiment. If you have your phone in front of you and you’re on a couch, hold it up at your regular viewing distance. It likely takes up as much or close to as much area as your TV on the other side of the room. Now, because we’re picturing a folding phone, double or triple that space. With a resolution and screen quality as high as a TV screen, and added headphones, the quality on offer is at least comparable, if not better, on phones.
The World of Virtual Reality
VR and AR are much simpler to quantify as a positive playing experience. In short, these systems let you virtually insert a screen into a space. These can be of just as high quality as a TV screen, with the audio of ultra-high-quality earphones. The size of this screen can be just as large as you want it. In VR, you could sit in the biggest movie theatre that ever existed. In AR, you could project a screen the size of a mountain, if for some reason you wanted to do that. The only downside is potential head discomfort, which many users adjust to over time.
All of this is to say that while everybody has their preferred way to watch, there is no concrete set of acceptable methods of engagement. New systems are offering more by the day, and many of these can at least match up to what more established methods offer. You don’t have to love them yourself, but any enthusiast at least owes it to themselves to try them out if the opportunity arises, so you can be confident that they’re not for you. Ultimately, the wide range of viewing formats underscores how personal the act of watching a movie really is. What matters most is not the size of the screen or the sophistication of the hardware, but the ability of the film to reach you where you are: mentally, emotionally, and physically. As long as the format supports that connection rather than fragments it, the experience remains valid, even if it doesn’t align with traditional expectations.
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