“The Hateful Eight” is shot in 70mm and its theatre setup is intense

On Christmas Day, Quentin Tarantino’s film “The Hateful Eight” will be released in select theaters throughout the country. A unique aspect of this motion picture is that it was entirely recorded in 70 mm film, authentic to the good ol’ days. Some have asked what the big deal about shooting in 70mm is? “70mm film still has an apparent resolution higher than 4k. When they’re digitized, many 70 mm films are scanned at 8k, which is four times larger than 4k. There aren’t many, if any, 8k projectors out yet. Also, the people pushing 70mm just have an affinity for film, the way some people still have an affinity for vinyl records even though uncompressed digital audio is more accurate,” says a film expert. This is basically the purest, cleanest, most perfect image that can be captured on camera.

But of course there’s a catch. Overall, the film will need about 10 full reels of film, which weigh about 250 pounds in total and need to be manually changed to watch the movie in full. This means that with every showing there will have to be a movie attendant on hand to load the next reel on queue. The movie is three hours long. That is why there are only 100 theaters able to show the film in 70mm. Thankfully for us, one of them is here in Austin. To give you a better idea of the process it takes to even set up these giant projectors, here’s a step-by-step setup from a theatre ready to show the film.