A projector being fitted into a United Airlines plane for in-flight movies. Photo / Getty Images
A hundred years ago, the first film was shown in the air. How do airlines choose what to show – and what does its future hold?
In 1919, passengers enjoyed the first in-flight meals – pre-packed lunch boxes at three shillings each on a trip from London to Paris.
But they would have to wait another six years for the full mid-air experience, when the first feature-length in-flight movie was shown on the same route on an Imperial Airways converted Handley Page World War I bomber in April 1925.
The picture was The Lost World, an American stop-motion fantasy adventure released two months earlier and adapted from Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel. The 106-minute movie told the story of a group of explorers who discover that dinosaurs still walk the Earth. It featured stop-motion special effects by Willis O’Brien, years before he would use them on King Kong.
A sign on the side of that groundbreaking flight – containing a dozen or so wicker seats – declared: “World’s first aircraft cinema”. The film was silent but accompanied by a live orchestra, broadcast over radio from the Berlin Broadcasting Station.
The stunt combined two roaring new technologies, cinema and passenger flight, just a few short decades after two sets of brothers, the French Lumières and the US Wrights, had pioneered their development.
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The Mon Ciné French film magazine was sceptical about the British innovation. “Will the airlines decide to install cinemas on board their planes to charm the passengers during the flight hours?” it asked. “This is hardly probable, because the enterprise is not without risks.” After all, the bulky nitrate film reels were highly flammable.
Ultimately, it was the concept – not the celluloid – that caught light. Regular film services were eventually rolled out in 1961, with US pioneer Trans World Airlines advertising: “Don’t just sit there! Fly TWA and see a movie on the way!”
By 1965, a reporter for Life magazine said passengers had got the hang of the new-fangled offering. He recalled one occasion where he “encountered turbulence at the gate. Some of my fellow travellers had found out that our feature was Winston Churchill in The Finest Hours, while, at the next gate, TWA’s flight landing at Kennedy had immediate seating for one of the Rock Hudson-vs-Doris Day epics. Mass defections from the Churchill flight followed.”
As we celebrate a century of airborne entertainment, why are millions of us still choosing to watch films during our flights, despite an ocean of new media alternatives?
“Movies are still incredibly important,” says Dominic Green, president of the Airline Passenger Experience Association (Apex) and director of in-flight entertainment at United Airlines. “They’re still our number one piece of content.”
Eighty per cent of the airline’s passengers engage with the seat-back screens, and at least half of those are staring at old-fashioned motion pictures. The in-flight entertainment market is estimated to be worth almost £7 billion (about NZ$15b). And even Hollywood stars value it. Oscar-winner Jessica Chastain was furious last year when she received a US$15 (NZ$26) credit from JetBlue after complaining “that I paid that for your flight entertainment system that didn’t work for the duration of my 6hr flight”.
When it comes to who watches what, Green says it is hard to predict based on departure point or destination. “The golden rule, we found, is there is no golden rule.”
Action and comedy tend to be the most popular genres, but horror and thrillers also do well. Whoever chose to screen The Lost World above the world 100 years ago was clearly on to something.
Raphael Girardoni, managing director of customer experience at American Airlines, says that whether you turn left or right when you board is also largely irrelevant: “The content is, I would say, class-agnostic.”
However, says Green: “What we do see is some of that niche content that might be a bit more edgy sometimes performs a bit better in business class because there’s more privacy there.”
He admits: “I’m one of those creepy people that’s curled up in the corner getting thrills out of watching scary movies on a flight.” At the other end of the spectrum, he also enjoys episodes of animated preschool series Bluey, which was in the airline’s top five most-watched TV shows for the whole of last year.
“We don’t have that many child passengers to account for the viewership, but it’s because a lot of adults like me are dipping into that for a kind of mental break.”
It speaks to passengers’ hunger for lightweight content in the clouds – perhaps after enduring the rigours of travelling to the airport and making it through security. The likes of family comedy Inside Out 2, an in-the-air favourite throughout last year, are the visual equivalent of a tomato juice and packet of pretzels: the perfect tonic as you begin to ascend.
“Barbie did amazingly well and it wasn’t necessarily with the typical audience that would go and see it at the cinema,” says Green. “It was often middle-aged business travellers [looking for] a bit of an escape.”
When it comes to TV, the “comfort factor” is the name of the game, with many travellers choosing to binge-watch old sitcoms such as Friends and The Big Bang Theory (a trend also seen with at-home streaming services). “I myself fall into that category,” says Girardoni. “When I get on board, I’ll watch things that I have seen before, movies like The Holiday [the 2006 romcom starring Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet].”
United’s top movie title in December was It Ends With Us. “We were wondering whether some of that was to do with all the drama associated with the two main actors,” says Green, of the bitter and now litigious dispute between director Justin Baldoni and his co-star Blake Lively. “Interestingly, Deadpool & Wolverine was number two, which has a relationship obviously [its star Ryan Reynolds is Lively’s husband].” Alien: Romulus and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice were in third and fourth place.
At Qantas, Oppenheimer was the top choice of 2024, beating Barbie, which was 2023’s most-watched. At Delta, both were top of the tree across its 165,000 seat-back screens.
While at cruising altitude, you will not just be subject to jetlag and cabin pressure but also to movie censorship. Swearing might have been stripped out, while many airlines ask for the logos of rival carriers to be Photoshopped away. For companies based in the Middle East, images of pigs will likely have been redacted. The censoring is usually done by hired agencies, or “in-flight content distribution specialists”, with the approval of the movie-makers.
What about films that feature plane crashes? “Generally, we don’t show things that are unsettling in that regard,” says Girardoni.
Overall, explains Green, as a single screen at the front of the plane has been replaced by individual monitors, the need for editing (whether it be “the odd F-bomb or cleavage shot”) has diminished, replaced instead by content “warning slates”. United has 60, preparing viewers for everything from cigarette use to discussions of mental health. He adds that that figure is unlikely to grow further because “we don’t want to make it too messy and complicated”.
The airlines have copious data on “not just selections, but also duration by title and completions. We can’t actually tell if a customer falls asleep during a movie without putting a camera or other type of sensor in the seat. But we do capture active exits,” Green says. This is when a passenger switches off a film once the credits have started rolling. “That tells us that a customer is still actively viewing, rather than asleep and letting the movie play through the credits and then ending by itself.”
Most film-makers probably give little thought to how their creations are experienced in the sky. Christopher Nolan is famously fastidious about every detail of his process, from the sound mixing to Imax film 1.43:1 aspect ratio. Yet he has allowed Oppenheimer to be watched on the back of a seat.
Studios, in consultation with directors and producers, have the final say on what gets shown and how it gets edited. The aerial audience tends not to have an impact on how movies are made or marketed but it is a handy extra slice of revenue that film-makers court. Most large studios have specific salespeople dedicated to selling to the “out-of-home” audience. Apex held its annual content market in Dubai, which unites movie companies with all the major airline buyers, earlier this month.
Some studios will actively accommodate plane audiences, recording alternative, airline-friendly scenes during filming that can be seamlessly swapped to replace bad language with family-friendly rewrites (the alternative is bleeping or dubbing done in post-production). Meanwhile, increasing numbers of producers and directors are telling airlines they will not accept any changes to their movies whatsoever – it is a matter of take it or leave it.
“I might get into trouble with the studios if I start throwing out names,” says Green, though he is prepared to cite two creatives who used to ban their productions being shown on planes but have had a change of heart.
“One was Fawlty Towers in the UK. It was only a couple of years ago that the BBC got approval from John Cleese for airlines to be able to license that content, 40-something years after it was aired. In the US, Jerry Seinfeld did not feel that the size and quality of the screens that were then available were the right way to show Seinfeld. They’ve both since relaxed those rules, and I think it’s partly because we’re investing in much better quality screens.”
The volte-face also comes at the same time as the everyday consumption of content on compact tablets and phones at home has normalised the watching of multimillion-dollar productions in miniature.
No one is arguing that 30,000ft is the ideal place to appreciate art. But the airlines still believe that we value the experience – observing this in customer satisfaction surveys – and they are responding by investing in new 4K screens, more intuitive software and higher-quality content.
Nevertheless, the seat-back movie screen is facing challenges. On the one hand, some youngsters are experimenting with the “rawdogging” trend, popularised online, of travelling on long flights without indulging in any form of on-screen amusement.
“Just rawdogged it, 15hr flight to Melbourne. No movie, no music, just flightmap (I counted to one million twice),” an Australian music producer wrote in a caption to a popular video on TikTok last year. In January, shooting began on The Entertainment System Is Down, a dark satire set on a long-haul flight on which passengers are compelled to face the agony of being bored.
On the other hand, passengers are choosing from all manner of other options offered by carriers, or are ignoring them all in favour of using their own devices as airlines usher in fast, free Wi-Fi across their fleets.
Flyers are no longer restricted to movies and are enjoying podcasts, top-flight TV and music. Qantas customers last year listened to half a million hours of Taylor Swift – the equivalent of 35,700 flights between Sydney and Los Angeles.
In October last year, Qatar Airways launched the world’s first Boeing 777 Starlink-equipped flight, using Elon Musk’s satellite technology to offer TV streaming, live sports, video calling and real-time online gaming free of charge. It remains to be seen whether the offering of such easy and reliable internet will threaten the on-board movie, and a trusty revenue stream for the film studios.
However, one thing is for sure: jet-powered film is still gaining altitude. Sarah Downs, managing director of in-flight entertainment and connectivity at Delta, says: “We expect the next five years will be more transformational than the last 50.”
This article originally featured in The Telegraph.
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