Why Can Only Five Theaters in the World — or, More Precisely, Why Are Only Five Willing to — Show Ang Lee's High-End Film?

It's a gamble: after spending a fortune on a one-time equipment overhaul, how much money comes back — and how many future films will ever use the equipment?

At one in the morning on November 6, the first person got in line outside the Shanghai Film Art Center on Xinhua Road in Shanghai. By ten that morning the line had snaked around to the Fanyu Road intersection next door, with more than 200 people waiting. They were all there for the opening of ticket sales for the highest-spec screenings of Ang Lee's new film Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. Online sales wouldn't start until three that afternoon, but everyone wanted a good seat.

They had all come for the 3D, 4K, 120-frames-per-second format. Weekend and weekday-evening screenings cost 200 yuan; weekday morning and afternoon screenings were 150 yuan and 180 yuan.

By around 8:30 that evening, prime-time screenings had sold about 70% of their seats, while off-peak screenings were running at 30% to 40%. The last film to put audiences in a line outside a theater like this was Avatar.

But those numbers don't seem to have been enough to let the Shanghai Film Art Center relax. As one of only two theaters on the Chinese mainland with the rights to screen the film in its highest format, it had already put in "on the order of one million to ten million yuan." Even before tickets went on sale, reviews in the overseas press had stirred up some argument. Given how much money was on the line, Ang Lee's film was a gamble for the Shanghai Film Art Center.

Months earlier, the press had already reported the news: the highest-spec version of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (3D, 4K, 120fps) could be shown on only five screens worldwide, three of them in Asia — Beijing's Bona Cinema, the Shanghai Film Art Center, and Vieshow Cinemas in Taipei's Qsquare mall. Ang Lee himself turned up for the film again and again, explaining why he had taken up the new technology and where he thought film technology was headed. Right up until the Taiwan screening, he was still telling reporters and the public, "If this film turns out badly, blame me, not the technology. The technology is innocent."

No one could know what kind of word of mouth and box office this entirely new way of watching a film would get in the world's most important film market. Because of the limits on which theaters could show it, what it was really being tested against was the audience in Beijing, Shanghai, and the areas around them.

From the Shanghai Film Art Center's side, it had thrown in everything it had — at the very least, every poster spot in the building had been given over to the image above. The one difference was that the posters on site also listed three formats: 3D/4K/120fps, 3D/2K/60fps, and 3D/2K/24fps.

In case that string of numbers still reads like a riddle, here is what it means. 4K refers to the resolution and sharpness of the projection, a standard four times that of the 2K most theaters use for everyday screenings. Worldwide, only a few thousand screens can project 4K.

In film, a single still image is called a "frame." Film works at all because of persistence of vision: if enough still frames flash by within a second, the eye sees continuous motion. 24 frames per second is the format film stock has commonly used, because persistence of vision in humans lasts about 0.01 seconds, which matches a rate of 24 frames per second.

The 120fps Ang Lee used sharply raises a film's sense of "reality" — you no longer feel you are watching a performance, but watching something actually happen. That sensation is not always a gain for the viewing experience, though, since film has existed at 24 frames per second for the past 100 years. The one exception was Peter Jackson, and even then The Hobbit only reached 48 frames per second.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk — a film with a mouthful of a title — tells the story of a 19-year-old American boy. Billy Lynn joins the U.S. Army infantry and is sent to the war in Iraq. In 2005 he survives a firefight, and the Bush administration brings him home to show off what the war has achieved, including an appearance at halftime of a Dallas Cowboys football game. Afterward, Billy Lynn and the other veterans are sent back to Iraq by the same administration.

Technology, by Ang Lee's account, is what he is leaning on to bring audiences back into theaters. About the story itself he has said much less.

What Ang Lee did not expect was that using new technology to bring audiences back to theaters would turn into a paradox.

On one side, 3D, 4K, and 120fps had audiences curious. On the other, those same new technologies made theaters hesitate. So far, of the more than 140,000 screens worldwide, only five have brought in the equipment needed to show Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk in its highest format.

Zhu Hong is technical director at Shanghai Film Technology Development Co., which manages the equipment in the 41 theaters owned by Shanghai Film Group along with the system that links them. Screen 1 at the Shanghai Film Art Center is one of those five. Zhu Hong told QDaily that as early as April this year, at the film convention in Las Vegas, Shanghai Film Group had made contact with Ang Lee's team and agreed to work together. It was at that same convention that Ang Lee first screened a clip of the film in its highest format.

Wanda, which also attended the Las Vegas convention, never approached Ang Lee's team. That doesn't mean Wanda had no interest in showing the 120fps version of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. According to Wang Qi, general manager of the information technology department at Wanda Cinema Line, when Wanda was considering bringing in Dolby Cinema early this year, it asked Dolby whether the system could run 120fps and was told it could.

As for why Wanda didn't go straight to Ang Lee's team and bring in the top-spec projection system he specified, Wang Qi told QDaily it "didn't make economic sense."

Ambassador Theatres, one of Taiwan's three big chains, had the same doubts. "The chain has to carry the cost of the hardware, and every theater weighs whether the investment is worth it. Even when everyone could screen The Hobbit in a high-frame-rate version, not every theater upgraded for it. That's because afterward we never heard of another film being shot at a high frame rate, so you end up asking whether you're doing this for just this one movie," Cai Shengxiang, who handles public relations for Ambassador Theatres, told QDaily.

On this point, Shanghai Film Group sounds a little pleased with itself. "The investment really was large. Not every theater company has the eye for it, or the willingness to put in that much," said Lu Ben, Zhu Hong's colleague at Shanghai Film Technology Development. "The cost was on the order of one million to ten million yuan."

The money all went into equipment. A film-industry figure who asked not to be named told QDaily that the Shanghai Film Art Center spent about 5 million yuan on the overhaul, which meant that "apart from the screen itself, the entire front end of the projection was replaced: the projector, the axis alignment, and the brightness all had to be measured again from scratch."

Zhu Hong used the projector as an example. The projector specified by Ang Lee's team was a Christie 6P laser projector. The Shanghai Film Art Center had installed a Christie laser projector two years earlier and upgraded it last year from 3P to 6P. Even that fell short of what Ang Lee's team wanted. "The brightness of the modules had to go up further — adding half again as many modules as before, an increase of maybe a third."

The projector alone costs twice what an ordinary one does, said Nancy, who works in the technical department at Jinmao, Christie's distributor in Taiwan.

The servers had to be replaced too, mainly because a digital print in 3D, 4K, and 120fps is so large that it demands far more computing and decoding power than usual. "A two-hour film today runs around 300 gigabytes. This one is completely uncompressed, with separate channels for the left and right eye, so it needs two servers — the file comes to about 40 terabytes."

Even the theater's existing 3D glasses were no longer usable. "These glasses cost two orders of magnitude more than ordinary 3D glasses. Normally you can buy a pair of 3D glasses for less than 10 yuan. These are several hundred yuan a pair." With Screen 1 at the Shanghai Film Art Center seating at least 1,000 people, the 3D glasses alone came to more than 100,000 yuan.

"After the overhaul, the projection system no longer even meets the DCI digital cinema standard," Lu Ben added. It goes far, far beyond an ordinary digital projection system.

Given what the overhaul costs, getting the money back could take a very long time. Bona Cinema's Youtang branch, near Beijing's Chaoyangmen, is another of the five able to show Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk in its highest format. On Weibo, it told fans: "No matter what we charge this time, we lose money on it. Since the film is our own company's, we're treating this as a perk for our fans."

Even though Screen 1 at the Shanghai Film Art Center has more than 1,000 seats, more than three times the Bona theater's capacity, Lu Ben still sounded cautious. Asked whether the money could be earned back, he said: "You have to be willing to carry some of it as an investment. We have a positive estimate for the box office, but honestly, we don't know."

That's not only because the upfront spending was so large. Unlike earlier equipment upgrades, this time neither Bona nor the Shanghai Film Art Center can use the new system for anything but Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. Jinmao, which helped install the equipment at Vieshow Cinemas in Taipei's Qsquare, said the same: the whole system was configured specifically for Ang Lee's film.

Bona's public line is that all the equipment is leased and will go back when the term ends. Zhu Hong says the equipment isn't suited to ordinary films, so once Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk ends its run, the auditorium will have to be converted back to what it was. Heavy spending up front for a single film is exactly what lay behind Wang Qi's judgment that bringing in this projection system "didn't make economic sense."

Even so, compared with other projection technologies, theaters are frighteningly conservative about 3D, 4K, and 120fps. Consider deep-pocketed Wanda: in 2007, before Avatar made IMAX a household name, Wanda had already signed a contract with IMAX for 10 theaters. This past January, the first time Wanda worked with Dolby Cinema, it went straight to 100.

The difference may come down to this: on the road to promoting 3D, 4K, and 120fps film, Ang Lee is fighting alone, while IMAX and Dolby are both public companies, with perhaps hundreds or thousands of people across the company selling their technology to the film industry.

Both IMAX and Dolby work with theaters by supplying the equipment and then taking a share of the box office afterward. That clears away a theater's early worry that the equipment costs too much. Ang Lee, by contrast, is only a director, with no way to carry the several-million-yuan cost of each system. In bargaining with theaters, he is far weaker.

He also has no way to keep supplying content. IMAX can use its DMR technology to convert footage shot on ordinary cameras into the IMAX format. Dolby has Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos, which make films shot in ordinary formats look and sound better in a Dolby theater. Ang Lee can only shoot 3D, 4K, 120fps films one at a time, and at most use his own influence to pull other directors toward the format — and it is easy to imagine how hard that is.

"I'll sell this wherever I can, not just Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk — at least to tell my colleagues in the business that this is a possibility." There is something close to tragic in the way Ang Lee puts it: "I keep saying, I'm not crazy, I haven't lost my mind. I really do see it: this is something worth looking at. It's fine if people don't like this particular film, as long as they know it's worth pursuing."

So far, Ang Lee's push for 3D, 4K, and 120fps has not gone smoothly, especially after Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk had its premiere in New York, where critics were thoroughly negative about the technology. It is almost exactly what happened to Peter Jackson's 48fps version of The Hobbit.

The Hollywood Reporter granted that the technology does "expand the boundaries of cinema," but said it sometimes pulled the viewer in and sometimes pushed the viewer out of the film. Film School Rejects and The Guardian both felt the technical innovation only exposed the story's problems more plainly. "The images on screen have no grain, the color tones run cold, they look transparent and slick — and for nearly two hours they keep throwing cold water on any viewer hoping to build an emotional connection with the story."

CinemaBlend tried to explain the sensation with science: "Many researchers believe the brain can only perceive about 40 distinct moments per second. Once a film goes past 40 frames, we start to feel it is real... When a film plays at 24 frames, our brains tell us it isn't real, and that's what lets us accept the unnatural parts of the acting and the lighting. That is how film works."

Zhu Hong defended the film by comparing vinyl records and CDs: a CD may lack the texture of vinyl, but you can't deny a CD sounds better. In the end he put the criticism down to people simply not being used to it. He also admitted he had never watched a full 120fps film himself.

Zhu Hong's view may be his alone. A person close to the Shanghai Film Art Center told QDaily: "The Shanghai Film Art Center was full of confidence before. Since then there has been a bit more hesitation."

"I think 120fps may take some time to accept," said Wang Qi of Wanda Cinema Line. "A more scientific approach would have been to do 48fps or 60fps first."

Against this criticism, Ang Lee seems a little helpless. During a live Q&A on Sina Weibo, a user asked: "What would you suggest ordinary viewers look for, to appreciate the shift in film's way of expressing itself that 120fps brings, or the new angles it offers?" Ang Lee's answer: "Open your mind, allow yourself into a whole new sensory world. This is only the beginning — don't be impatient!"

He may well be right. Using 3D, 4K, and 120fps means the whole craft of shooting a film has to be adjusted, and heavily.

Zhu Hong gave an example. The film has many scenes set in ice and snow. In the past an actor could walk out of a warm room and strike a pose and it probably wouldn't have mattered; at 120fps that kind of shortcut shows. That may be exactly where Ang Lee tripped, since 120fps is so demanding technically that even he, while shooting, could only watch playback at 60fps.

Beyond technique, the technology reaches into more things than one might imagine. Michael, who handles technology at Jianda, a Taiwanese equipment supplier, used 3D shooting to make the point: besides telling the story, the filmmaker has to account for external factors he can't control. "Take the distance between the eyes — it varies a lot with age, so when you shoot you have to think about what age group the story is for. These are all very fine details."

Wang Qi, Zhu Hong, and the other industry people QDaily interviewed for this story were strikingly of one mind on a single point: what drives theaters to upgrade their technology is the response of the market. What audiences think is good stays in theaters; what they don't gets dropped.

As things stand, though, 3D, 4K, and 120fps is nowhere near the stage where anyone can start talking about "mass rollout." As a new thing, it works more as something that pricks the audience's curiosity. Which also means it easily turns into a sales gimmick.

On November 3, Wanda announced that six of its Dolby Cinema theaters had finished upgrading and could show the 120fps version of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, and that it planned a fresh round of publicity around this. In that publicity, of course, it would carefully note that the format it screens is 2K, not 4K.

Other brands that can't project 120fps have raised a banner over their ability to show 60fps instead. Yu Shenglun, marketing director at RealD, said 1,600 screens nationwide can show the 60fps version of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk.

That has drawn some skepticism. The film-industry figure quoted above argued that film projection is a complete system — much as a high-speed train reaches its speed only if the cars, the track, and the gauges are all built to high-speed standards. Claiming you can show 120fps or 60fps may mean only the train itself meets the standard and nothing else does.

Asked about this, Zhu Hong only shook his head slightly and said no, it wouldn't be enough. "Dolby Cinema's brightness is 14 to 16 foot-lamberts (a unit of luminance), but Ang Lee's new film calls for 28."

Wang Qi of Wanda Cinema Line thinks Dolby Cinema and the system Ang Lee specified each have their strengths. "Dolby Cinema can reach a contrast ratio of a million to one, while other projection systems may only reach a few thousand to one." Wanda also stressed again that the 120fps version it shows is not the same as Ang Lee's highest-spec version.

"I really want to see the sense of taking part, as real as reality — the audience in the first person, not only the third person. Which is to say, the relationship between people and a film, the way they experience its setting and its story, changes." That is how Ang Lee described his thinking behind 120fps. "I know there's nothing good about 24 frames. It's just the cheapest."

Whether Ang Lee is right, whether this new thing turns out to be a flash in the pan, whether the audience's curiosity lifts the box office — it looks as though the answer really does rest on how Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk performs.

(Unless otherwise noted, all images in this article are from Douban.)