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A frame of about 1.37 to 1 was the standard shape of cinema for two decades. The figure is taken from Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.

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Yes. It sits on the Movies & TV shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.

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The Academy ratio ruled screens until the 1950s

A frame of about 1.37 to 1 was the standard shape of cinema for two decades In 1932 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences settled on an aperture of 1.37 to 1, close to the ratio used in the silent era, with room on the print for an optical soundtrack. Almost every Hollywood film made between the early 1930s and the early 1950s was composed for that shape. Widescreen formats later displaced it. It sits in Mondo's movies & tv collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.

Where this comes from

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

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16:9 was a compromise between film shapesEngineers picked a ratio roughly between old television and widescreen cinema Letterboxing kept the wide shape on square setsBlack bars above and below let a widescreen film fit an older television Super 35 crops the picture for widescreenThe negative is exposed full height and masked to a wide shape later Surround sound uses six separate channelsFive full-range channels plus a low-frequency channel carry the mix Digital cinema packages replaced reels of printsThe DCP is a set of encrypted files rather than a physical film The American TV standard used 525 linesNTSC ran 30 frames a second, split into two interlaced fields

Tags: aspect-ratio, 1932, standards

The Academy ratio ruled screens until the 1950s: the short answers

Where does this come from, and can I check it?: A frame of about 1.37 to 1 was the standard shape of cinema for two decades. The figure is taken from Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
Is this really a movies & tv fact?: Yes. It sits on the Movies & TV shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
What else can I read about it?: The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.