Cinema already has a long history and has evolved as technical innovations have been incorporated, such as the arrival of sound or color. Some have transformed the seventh art and have stirred up its foundations; but others, such as 3D, have stayed halfway and have not finished curdling among the public and the rooms.
However, the cinema continues to experiment and try to adapt to new times and trends. Thus, the first film shot could soon be released to be completely consumed in vertical format.
The initiative has come from the prolific Russian director and producer Timur Bekmambetov , who has participated in numerous Hollywood films. His premiere in the Mecca of cinema occurred in 2009, as the director of Wanted , the film starring James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman, which is a film adaptation of the comic with the same name.
Bekmambetov and his team are going to start V2 production. Escape From Hell , the first blockbuster to be made entirely vertically . Inspired by the success of Instagram or TikTok stories, the project has smartphone consumers in mind.
V2. Escape From Hell will star Russian actor Pavel Priluchny, who will play Mikhail Devyatayev, a captured Soviet pilot who leads an escape from a German concentration camp by hijacking a plane. The plot would be based on a true story that occurred 75 years ago.
Two versions are scheduled to be produced, one for the Russian market and one for the international market in English, which will have different scenes. It is expected that its ‘premiere’ will take place in early 2021 , although it will not be in theaters, but through digital platforms.
The director of experimentation
To date, the Russian filmmaker has shown that he enjoys innovating and testing the limits of the celluloid world. He is known for being one of the inventors of the Screenlife film and television format , by which events unfold through the perspective of a computer, tablet or smartphone .
In addition, in 2015 he produced Hardcore Henry , an action film that attracts attention because it is shot entirely from the first-person point of view.
It is not the first time that Bekmambetov has played with the vertical format. In fact, it has produced Dead of Night , the first series recorded in this format and broadcast through Snapchat in which a teenage girl tries to escape a zombie apocalypse.
The cinema is not ready yet, but the TV is
Although movie theaters have not yet thought about adapting to the popularity of the new format, television manufacturers have. Last year Samsung announced The Sero , a screen that can rotate 90 degrees and be positioned both horizontally and vertically.
With this new product, the South Korean company wants to target the millennial and generation Z public, accustomed to consuming audiovisual content in this format on the screen of their mobile devices. It would be enough to touch the television with a smartphone so that the latter can reproduce its contents on the rotating screen.
The Samsung The Sero (a word that means ‘vertical’ in Korean) has a 43-inch screen, 4K resolution and QLED color. Its price, of course, would not be within the reach of any young person: it would amount to about 15,000 euros.
