Even IndieWire’s Own Staff Cannot Agree on the Best Format for Seeing ‘One Battle After Another’

Consider it an… internal battle (after another). When it was first announced that Paul Thomas Anderson’s tenth film “One Battle After Another” was going to be available in multiple premium formats, our primary task here at IndieWire was clear: how would we best educate our readers (and ourselves) about the merits of each individual option?

When our resident VistaVision evangelist Jim Hemphill carefully broke down each and every format, I confess I expected his guide would end any debates, full-stop. VistaVision is obviously the superior format, right? (That’s a short way to note it’s my own preference.) Well, perhaps in an ideal world in which the super-sized format was available to all audiences. And we sure-as-shootin’ don’t live in an ideal world, and VistaVision prints of PTA’s latest masterpiece are only available in four venues around the world.

Thus began weeks of chatter around the IndieWire water coolers.