What the Effie? "Catching Fire" on Stan Doesn’t Include the Film’s Best Bit

The aspect ratio… she doesn’t change!

There are some scandals that rock the very foundations of our society. Watergate. The Profumo affair. The revelation that Julianna Margulies and Archie Panjabi didn’t share the screen for 51 straight episodes of The Good Wife.

Now comes the unearthing of a controversy that will shake you to your core, and from which recovery (in your trust in society, and in your personal wellbeing) is far from guaranteed: the streaming file of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire on Stan does not include the aspect ratio change at the 82-minute mark.

If you, like me, have spent the coronavirus lockdown revisiting some old and semi-recent favourites, you may have decided to dive back into the Hunger Games quadrilogy on Stan, which was added to the local streamer on 13 July.

As everyone knows, the best of the series is part two, Catching Fire, which saw director Francis Lawrence take over from Gary Ross. It is easily the most morally wrenching instalment of the franchise, and imbued with the most potent social commentary. (The Hunger Games is by far the best of the recent YA sagas, and Catching Fire is its Empire Strikes Back, what with its downbeat cliffhanger ending and all; do not @ me.)

Spoilers ahead, but come on, it came out in 2013.

In Catching Fire, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) is reluctantly pulled back to an impromptu "quarter quell" in which the burgeoning revolutionary must once again return to the killing fields, where President Snow (Donald Sutherland) hopes she’ll be wiped out, ending her rising political influence. However, halfway through the film, and just before she enters the playing area, Snow's goons kill Katniss' bestie and costume designer Cinna (Lenny Kravitz) in the launch room right in front of her. It’s at this point of the movie that those who saw the flick in IMAX-equipped cinemas bore witness to a magic trick: as Katniss slowly emerges from beneath the ground into the arena, the size of the screen expands, with the traditional 'black bars' that make the movie appear 'widescreen' suddenly filled. Don’t know what we mean? See it happen below.

Unfortunately, if you saw Catching Fire in a regular cinema, on DVD, and now on Stan, you missed this mind-bending, paradigm-shifting, doors-of-perception-opening moment. It instead remains at the 2.35:1 aspect ratio, without evolving into 1.78:1 for the arena sequence.

We, of course, have reached out to Stan for a comment, and will report back once we hear from them. It certainly isn’t unusual for a streaming file of theirs (or that of any streaming service) to include artificial black bars that appear and disappear at key moments. The second and most recent season of Black Monday on Stan did this by changing from widescreen to a boxy aspect ratio for flashback sequences. So what gives?

Nonetheless, those wanting to replicate the cinema experience for Catching Fire during this time of cinematic uncertainty won’t be able to.

Hasn't Cinna been disrespected enough?