Darren Aronofsky‘s Sphere film, “Postcard From Earth,” is responsible for establishing all kinds of historic cinematic firsts — like the fact that it is the only movie ever to be released in 18K resolution on a screen that spans 160,000 square feet.
But movie buffs will particularly enjoy one first that doesn’t fully reveal itself until the very last 90 seconds or so of the 50-minute running time, in the massive Las Vegas dome where the film just premiered.
The end credits begin appearing in the middle of the screen, as one would expect — or at least in what counts as the middle, if your field of vision is trained forward and not skyward. And then the credits expand out from there, bit by bit, until a substantial portion of the LED screen is filled by the entire list of names of people who worked on “Postcard From Earth,” all at once.
And yes, in 18K resolution, all of those thousands of names are completely legible, as tiny as they might seem in the overall scheme — or Sphere — of things.
Aronofsky smiles slightly as he tells Variety about the unusual, not-soon-to-be-repeated gambit:
“They were like, ‘You want to do a roll or something?’ I was like, ‘You know, actually, it might be just kind of interesting to stick everyone’s name up there.’ And I think it’s 2,000 names.
“The nice thing about that,” he adds, “is we’re able to get the credits done in about 90 seconds, which is great, too.”
Mind-blowing shots of purple mountain majesties are one thing. But a single-screen testimonial to the thousands of villagers it takes to build a film, on a screen roughly 35 stories high? For film-biz workers, that may be the ultimate trip.
A portion of the credits for Darren Aronofsky’s film ‘Postcard From Earth,’ now playing at Sphere in Las Vegas
Variety
“Postcard From Earth” is currently playing at the newly opened Vegas venue as the anchor of The Sphere Experience, on days when U2 does not have a performance booked in the dome in the evening.
Read the rest of Variety‘s Q&A with Aronofsky about the making of the film here: “Darren Aronofsky on His Sphere Film, ‘Postcard From Earth’: ‘I Had No Idea What an 18K Image Would Look Like, Four Football Fields Large.’“