A presentation method preserving widescreen aspect ratios by adding horizontal bars
Letterboxing retains a film’s original aspect ratio—commonly 2.35:1 or 1.85:1—on narrower displays by inserting black bars above and below the image. This avoids cropping and maintains the director’s composition. Early videotape formats required manual masking; modern digital players scale and pillar-fill automatically.
Letterboxing first gained traction on LaserDisc in the 1980s, allowing cinephiles to experience widescreen films intact. The technique spread to DVD and streaming, where viewers can toggle between full-screen crops and letterboxed presentations.
Audiences initially balked at “lost” screen space, but cinephile communities championed letterboxing as a mark of fidelity. Some distributors offer dynamic letterboxing—adjusting bar size based on display resolution—while others use anamorphic encoding to embed widescreen film into full-screen frames.
Letterboxing remains the standard for presenting theatrical releases on home media, ensuring the integrity of cinematic framing across diverse screens.
Vito Russo Test
The Vito Russo Test is a set of criteria used to evaluate the quality of LGBTQ+ representation in film, ensuring that queer characters are both present and integral to the narrative.
Mise-en-abyme
Mise-en-abyme is a sophisticated artistic technique where a film or image contains a smaller version of itself, creating a nested, self-reflecting, and often infinite loop.
Show Bible Update
A show bible update is the essential process of revising and expanding a television series' foundational creative document to reflect story developments, character arcs, and world-building changes.
DuVernay Test
The DuVernay Test is a critical framework for analyzing racial representation in film, assessing whether characters of color have fully realized lives independent of the white characters.
Token-Gated Screening
A token-gated screening is an exclusive online film event where access is restricted to users who can prove ownership of a specific digital asset, such as an NFT, in their cryptocurrency wallet.
Heat-map Analytics
Heat-map analytics for video provides a powerful visual representation of aggregate audience engagement, showing precisely which moments in a film or trailer are most-watched, re-watched, or skipped.
What's After the Movie?
Not sure whether to stay after the credits? Find out!
Explore Our Movie Platform
New Movie Releases (2025)
Famous Movie Actors
Top Film Production Studios
Movie Plot Summaries & Endings
Major Movie Awards & Winners
Best Concert Films & Music Documentaries
Movie Collections and Curated Lists
© 2025 What's After the Movie. All rights reserved.