The Future Storaro Predicted

How 65mm and 2:1 found their way into the modern filmmaking landscape

Walk into the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan and look at Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper.

It is more than five hundred years old, yet its composition looks surprisingly familiar.

Vittorio Storaro certainly thought so.

When Storaro developed his Univisium concept in the late 1990s, he cited The Last Supper as an inspiration for its 2:1 aspect ratio. For Storaro, the painting represented an almost perfect example of the proportions he was looking for.

But Univisium wasn’t simply an idea about making a nice-looking frame.

Storaro was trying to solve a problem about the future of moving images.

And, looking at the filmmaking landscape today, some of what he imagined looks remarkably prescient.

A jungle of numbers

In the late 1990s, the aspect-ratio landscape was complicated.

Television was moving towards widescreen, with HDTV using an aspect ratio of approximately 1.78:1.

Cinema had a collection of established formats: 1.66:1, 1.85:1, 2.35:1 and, in large format, approximately 2.21:1 for 65mm.

Storaro described it as a “jungle of numbers.”

His concern was what happened when a film moved between those different environments.

A composition carefully created for the cinema could be cropped, reformatted or otherwise compromised when transferred to television.

His solution was Univisium: a 2:1 aspect ratio designed to sit between HD and the wider theatrical formats.

Storaro described 2:1 as a balance between the approximately 1.79:1 proportions of HD and the 2.21:1 frame of 65mm.

It wasn’t intended simply to be another aspect ratio. It was intended to be a common language.

The Last Supper

This is where Leonardo da Vinci enters the story.

Storaro has explained that he took the example of The Last Supper when developing Univisium.

The painting’s composition has an approximately 2:1 proportion, and Storaro saw in it something that went beyond mathematics.

It was a demonstration of how the shape of the frame could organise a composition.

That is an important distinction.

Aspect ratio isn’t just a technical specification.

It changes the way we compose.

A 1.33:1 frame encourages one kind of relationship between people and space.

A 1.85:1 frame encourages another.

A 2.39:1 frame gives us something different again.

And 2:1 sits somewhere interesting between the traditional television frame and the very wide theatrical frame.

For Storaro, the choice wasn’t arbitrary. It was part of a wider philosophy about composition and visual storytelling.

And then there was 65mm

The other part of Storaro’s thinking is perhaps even more interesting today.

He believed that the future of cinema would increasingly involve two principal forms of image capture: HD and 65mm.

HD would serve the electronic world.

65mm would provide the quality and scale required for large-screen cinema.

This was in the late 1990s.

At the time, that wasn’t necessarily an obvious prediction.

65mm was a specialist format. The equipment was expensive and relatively scarce, and only a small number of productions used it.

Meanwhile, digital acquisition was still in its infancy.

Storaro was effectively looking beyond the technology that existed and asking what the distribution landscape might eventually become.

His answer was Univisium.

2:1 would provide a common composition between the two worlds.

Univisium didn’t become the standard

Of course, there is an important qualification.

Univisium did not become the universal standard Storaro envisaged.

Cinema didn’t suddenly abandon 1.85:1 and 2.39:1.

Television didn’t switch wholesale to 2:1.

And the digital revolution took the industry in directions that would have been difficult to predict in 1998.

But something rather interesting happened.

The problem Storaro was trying to solve didn’t disappear.

It changed.

Television became streaming.

The distinction between television and cinema became increasingly blurred.

Films and episodic dramas began appearing on the same screens.

Audiences began watching high-end cinematic productions on televisions, laptops, tablets and phones.

And 2:1 started appearing with increasing frequency.

Enter Netflix

This is where Storaro’s idea becomes particularly intriguing.

Netflix didn’t invent 2:1.

And there is no reason to claim that Netflix adopted it because of Univisium.

But modern streaming has created precisely the sort of environment in which a format like 2:1 makes practical and aesthetic sense.

Netflix’s technical documentation now explicitly recognises 2.00:1 as one of the standard display aspect ratios it encounters, alongside 1.78:1, 1.85:1, 2.35:1, 2.39:1 and others.

That is quite a journey for an aspect ratio that was once the centrepiece of a cinematographer’s proposal for a future universal format.

The important thing isn’t that Netflix has somehow implemented Univisium.

It hasn’t.

The interesting thing is that the industry has independently arrived at circumstances in which Storaro’s proposed compromise makes a great deal of sense.

Why 2:1 works

There is a practical reason that 2:1 is such an attractive frame.

It’s wider than 16:9, giving images a more cinematic character.

But it isn’t as wide as 2.39:1, so it retains considerably more vertical information.

For drama, that can be extremely useful.

A close-up has room to breathe.

A two-shot can feel comfortably composed.

A group can occupy the frame without requiring an extremely wide field of view.

And when the same image is viewed on a conventional television or computer display, the amount of letterboxing is relatively modest.

It is a compromise.

But it is a remarkably useful compromise.

And perhaps that’s what Storaro understood.

A universal format doesn’t necessarily have to be perfect for every application.

It needs to be good enough across all of them.

From film to digital

There is another interesting twist.

Storaro originally developed Univisium in the world of film.

His system used three-perforation film transport to create a 2:1 image, making more efficient use of the negative and reducing film consumption compared with conventional four-perf 35mm.

He first used the format on Tango in 1997 and subsequently used Univisium on projects including Dune.

The concept therefore wasn’t simply theoretical.

It was a working production format.

Yet the format ultimately found greater relevance in a digital world.

That is perhaps one of the great ironies of the story.

Storaro designed a film format for a future that was about to become increasingly digital.

And the digital world eventually made his preferred aspect ratio easier to adopt.

And what about 65mm?

This is the part of Storaro’s prediction that I find particularly fascinating.

For years, 65mm remained a niche format.

Then came a renewed interest in large-format film.

And now we have major productions once again demonstrating what 65mm and IMAX film can do on a large screen.

The success of large-format productions has changed the conversation.

65mm is no longer simply a historical format kept alive by a handful of filmmakers.

It is once again being considered as a contemporary production format for major cinema.

Which brings us back to Storaro’s prediction.

He wasn’t necessarily right about exactly how the industry would get there.

But the destination he imagined looks surprisingly familiar.

The future arrived differently

Perhaps that is the most interesting lesson from Univisium.

Technological predictions rarely come true exactly as their creators imagine them.

Storaro imagined a world in which HD and 65mm would become the two principal image-capture formats, with 2:1 providing a common visual language between them.

Instead, digital cinema transformed the industry.

Streaming transformed distribution.

Cinema retained multiple aspect ratios.

And Univisium never became the universal standard.

Yet, more than twenty-five years later, we have a world in which:

2:1 is widely used for high-end screen storytelling.

Streaming has blurred the distinction between television and cinema.

Large-format film is experiencing a resurgence.

And 65mm is once again being used for some of the biggest productions in the world.

Perhaps Storaro wasn’t predicting the exact future.

Perhaps he was identifying the direction of travel.

And sometimes that’s what makes a prediction truly interesting.

Leonardo da Vinci painted The Last Supper more than five centuries ago.

Vittorio Storaro looked at its proportions and saw a possible future for cinema.

And now, more than twenty-five years after he proposed Univisium, the industry is producing images that look remarkably close to the future he imagined.

**Maybe the future didn’t ignore Storaro’s idea.

Maybe it just took a very long way around to get there.**

Mark