In January 2025, Netflix acquired a low-budget period piece, Train Dreams, at Sundance Film Festival, the largest marketplace for independent films in the US.
This looked business as usual: Netflix has been picking up Sundance favourites since it bought Mudbound in 2017, which became the platform’s first Oscar-nominated feature. This set a template: Netflix now scouts Sundance every year for films to launch into the awards orbit.
Train Dreams fit the mould. It was based on a novella that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and was written by Greg Kwedar and directed by Clint Bentley. Their previous film, Sing Sing, had just earned three Oscar nods when Train Dreams reached Sundance. Post its premiere, the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes described the film as a “gorgeous meditation on America, ably shouldered by one of Joel Edgerton’s very best performances”.
Last month, Netflix’s wager on the film paid off. It secured four Oscar nods: Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography and Best Original Song.
Train Dreams follows Robert Grainier (Edgerton), an American logger who fells centuries-old trees to lay rail lines. The job of systematically destroying an ancient landscape to deliver modernity’s dreams leaves him with nightmares. After a personal tragedy, Grainier withdraws into solitude and starts questioning the meaning of his existence.
One of the film’s highlights is its naturalistic cinematography. Grainier’s life unfolds in the background of mountain ranges, towering coniferous forests, and wet, unforgiving climate. The epic landscape is rendered with quiet reverence.
One curious choice that cinematographer Adolpho Veloso makes is particularly notable. He sets the aspect ratio (the width-to-height measure of images) at 3:2—a format associated with still photography. “We looked at old photographs of logging from the 1920s,” Veloso said, “and that sparked the idea.” Taller and narrower than traditional widescreen formats, the 3:2 invokes family albums and personal archives—by extension, memory itself. “You find the ratio in old photos,” he said, “or even new photos on your phone.”
But the choice of format ends up exposing the problems in Netflix acquiring Train Dreams. In a theatre, the 3:2 would have been immersive, turning trees into towers, diminishing the men passing beneath them, and allowing images to breathe. But on home screens—televisions, laptops, tablets, phones—the format appears boxed-in. Start streaming the film in a widescreen television, and the black bars on either sides of the frame immediately draw the eye. At least until the viewer adjusts to the format, Veloso’s aesthetic choice risks resembling a technical error.
Why, then, did the filmmakers choose Netflix? Perhaps the deal was a rational compromise. For a film like Train Dreams, Netflix offers financial security—it ensures a theatrical release (even if only for the mandatory ‘seven consecutive days in a theatre’ to qualify for awards), and saves the gamble on ticket sales alone.
The Best Picture nomination for Train Dreams reveals the defining undercurrent of this year’s Oscars—the mounting debate about how films should be seen, and the increasingly complex compromises artistes must make in the face of commercial realities.
Even on the surface, this is an unusual Oscars. The vampire saga Sinners has earned a record 16 nominations, appearing in every category for which it was eligible, including Best Picture. There is at least one non-Hollywood nominee in every category, making this the most international Oscars yet.
But beneath the surface is the still-unfolding battle between competing visions of cinema’s future. In this regard, Sinners provides an interesting contrast to Train Dreams. One of the most expensive films of the year, Sinners is directed and co-produced by Ryan Coogler, who first gained prominence by winning Sundance’s top prize in 2013 for Fruitvale Station. A searing but polarising biographical drama, Fruitvale Station was about the controversial killing of a young black man by a California police officer that led to widespread protests and riots.
Having directed blockbusters such as Creed and Black Panther over the years, Coogler is now both a commercial force and a culturally influential filmmaker. He had cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw shoot Sinners in two distinct aspect ratios: the ultra-wide 2.76:1 associated with epics like Ben-Hur, and the towering, nearly square 1.43:1 IMAX format. During key moments, the wider frame expands vertically, intensifying the visual impact. Arkapaw has done it so well that she has earned a historic Oscar nomination—the first woman of colour to be recognised in the category.
Unlike in Train Dreams, the format gamble does no disservice to Sinners. For one, viewers in ordinary theatres or on streaming platforms cannot experience the full aspect-ratio shift, because the taller IMAX sequences are cropped horizontally. The visual expansion is reduced, of course, but so is the risk of non-IMAX viewers taking it for a glitch. Sinners is also anything but meditative. Bursting with colour and energy, it is full of visual pyrotechnics. The film follows twin brothers Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan, the star of Fruitvale Station) who open a juke joint in 1930s Mississippi, only to encounter supernatural forces. To pull off the scenes where the twins interact, Coogler deploys split screens, complex choreography and effects-heavy set pieces. The format shift is just one of the film’s many big swings.
Before the film released last April, Coogler shot a 10-minute explainer about aspect ratios. He says the ideal way to watch the film is in a theatre—preferably on the largest possible screen, which would be a “true 70mm” IMAX theatre, capable of projecting the full 1.43:1 frame. “I still believe in the communal experience of going to the movies,” he says.
The problem was that Sinners was exhibited “the way it was intended” in just 10 theatres, all in North America and Europe. Worldwide, there are just about 30 “true 70mm” IMAX screens, mainly because the projection system is ultra-expensive to install and maintain, resulting in ticket prices that deter mass audiences.
Also, very few films are made for the format; the only true 70mm IMAX film this year is Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. When the Gujarat Science City in Ahmedabad, housing the only such screen in India, wanted to purchase the reel of Nolan’s Interstellar a few years ago, it encountered an unusual problem: IMAX asked for a fee to check availability.
It seems getting movies to theatres is becoming harder by the year. According to Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, filmmakers wanting to make movies “for movie theatres, for the communal experience” were clinging to an “outdated concept”. The rise of streaming, he said, had the audiences delivering Hollywood a message: “That they would like to watch movies at home, thank you.”
The long and short of it: A screen grab from Ryan Coogler’s explainer video, showing the change during the aspect-ratio shift in Sinners | Courtesy youtube@Kodak
Hollywood has fought this war before. In the 1950s, as prosperous families took to television sets, living rooms replaced theatres as entertainment venues. Sensing an existential threat, Hollywood doubled down on spectacle, spending millions to develop technologies such as Technicolor, stereophonic sound, and film formats like Cinemascope, VistaVision and later IMAX. A new generation of filmmakers, empowered by these innovations, churned out films that were visually and thematically more ambitious than earlier, resulting in a “New Hollywood” wave that had people returning to theatres.
That history is inspiring a lot of filmmakers today. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, which has emerged as an Oscar heavyweight second only to Sinners with 13 nominations including Best Picture, draws heavily from the sensibilities of the New Hollywood classic The French Connection. “A lot of the movies in that period had a certain stylistic roughness,” says cinematographer Michael Bauman, who shot One Battle After Another in VistaVision, a widescreen format developed in 1954 and used for such landmark films as Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956). This is the first time in over 60 years that VistaVision has been used for both shooting and projecting a film.
Mixing the existentialism of Train Dreams and the spectacle of Sinners, One Battle After Another follows Bob, a paranoid, washed-up revolutionary (Leonardo DiCaprio) living off-grid with his teenage daughter. Bob is forced to go on the run when his former lover and fellow radical, Perfidia, betrays their radical group. A relentless chase across cities and desert highways ensue, as Bob tries to protect his daughter from a deranged villain.
The film features car chases and gunfights across harsh terrains. Bauman uses VistaVision with such precision that the large-scale action and intimate human drama call for experiencing it in a theatre. The scale, according to him, is something no home screen can replicate. Sarandos might grudgingly agree.
Both One Battle After Another and Sinners come from the same stable—Warner Bros., which leads this year’s Oscars with 30 nominations. Among other major studios, Netflix has 16, Universal has 14, Disney has four, and Paramount has none. With Best Picture appearing to be a toss-up between One Battle After Another and Sinners, this seems to be a very good year for Warner Bros.
And maybe the last.
In December last year, Netflix made a surprise proposal to acquire Warner Bros. for about $80 billion, in what would be the largest media merger in history. Pending regulatory approval, the deal is expected to close later this year. If it does, it would not only be the end of one of Hollywood’s oldest and most storied studios, boasting one of the world’s largest and most diverse film libraries, but also give Netflix greater control over cinema’s future.
Times are changing in more ways than one. This year’s Sundance festival was the first since the death of its founder, the New Hollywood icon Robert Redford. Next year, the festival will leave the resort town of Park City, Utah, which has been its home for 40 years, and move to a new venue in neighbouring Colorado.
If the Warner Bros. deal goes through, Hollywood, too, might find itself packing its bags and going places.