HBOMAX has cropped the Cinerama film "The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grim" (1962)
Just found out that this was available on HBOMAX so I was curious which version would be the used, the curved "smilebox" version introduced on the 2022 Blu-Ray or the standard letterboxed version in 2.85:1 aspect ratio, and was greeted to this crop job of the curved version.
For context, the movie was shot entirely in Cinerama, a format where three film cameras shot simultaneously to create a massive panorama designed to be shown on curved screens, and so the people at Warner Archive went through the brutal undertaking of stitching the three images together and creating a simulation of Cinerama curved screens. It is without a doubt one of the most impressive restorations ever made, so it's a real shame what's going on here.
I have noticed that major streaming services tend to present video in the content's exact aspect ratio instead of 16:9 containers for everything, so I suspect that this movie simply got flagged as 2.85:1 aspect ratio, got cropped to 1920 by 673 pixels, and no one noticed that they used the wrong version.
