On a late summer roadtrip, I recently tried out the Barco Escape panoramic film format.

It consists of three screens, the center one showing the standard theatrical cut of the feature movie and the two side screens showing additional contiguous footage shot by the original filmmakers. One of the people I saw it with said they want to see all their movie this way from now on, and it is indeed very enjoyable. It's like Cinerama for the new millenium. On the down side, unlike the curved screen of Cinerama, the angles between the screens is not always perfectly aligned, Wikipedia claims the angle between the screens is 45°, but it seemed closer to 30° to me, you feel quite enclosed. That compromise is necessary to allow the producers to not have to make a film that can only be seen on special screens, and thereforethey just have to shoot the additional lateral coverage if they want to add the option of Barco Escape to the few specially equipped theatres. Sure, it would be better to have the return of true Cinerama, but this is a good workaround that suits current movie economics.



The only films that have previously been available in Barco Escape so far were the two Maze Runner movies, but unfortunately the only movie available in the Barco Escape auditorium was Star Trek Beyond, so I had to endure this stinker again. There apparently is a horror movie shot natively in Barco Escape (The Hell Within), produced by Slash, perhaps as a feature demo, and this could be a gret use for the format if done well, but it has not been shown yet as far as I can tell.

Here's the official Barco Escape trailer for STB:

That trailer looks out of this world amazing. Never heard of Barco Escape before. I cannot even work out what it means. But it looks awesome. The right film, perhaps Avatar 2, would be a real experience!