It’s Saturday afternoon, and I’m at the local Regal Cinemas in East Greenbush. For me, I prefer this theater in that I don’t have to take a pre-assigned seat, and I can park outside the theater without having to walk through fifteen stores to get to the cinema.
The plan this week was to watch the new movie Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which I did. It was a good film in the Spider-Man franchise, and it advances the whole over-arching Marvel plotlines that should intersect with the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday mega-event in December.
That being said, the version I watched was different than ones most people expected to see.
I watched an open captioned version.
The 12:00 p.m. Saturday screening of Spider-Man: Brand New Day featured open-captioning for those with hearing issues. This is similar to the “closed captioned” feature on your television remote, where you can turn it on and read what’s on the screen. And Regal Cinemas offers assistive captioning technology in the form of closed-circuit glasses, where the captions appear on a special facial visor.
That being said … watching the movie in an open-captioned format was actually helpful, especially with a film that features a TON of sonic booms and orchestral swirls that can drown out some dialogue. And unlike the digital caption visors that Regal provides, the captions stay in a static place on the screen; with the visors, the captions can move around as you turn your head or adjust your eyes, causing the words to drift out of frame and your attention is drawn away from the screen.
The captioned version did not have an additional cost, which is nice. And, to my knowledge, it didn’t trim out any scenes or engage any alternate cinematography. I saw the same Spider-Man: Brand New Day as everyone else, without the booming RPX or ScreenX or thisX or thatX to distract.
In other words … it was a different and unique way to watch a blockbuster film. And I’m okay with that.
And it’s not like there hasn’t been descriptive captioning in motion pictures before. Heck, all the films before 1927 had descriptive open captioning in them, simply because synchronized sound hadn’t previously existed as a workable, reliable format.
Then again, I didn’t see anyone playing the Spider-Man theme on a cathedral-sized Wurlitzer pipe organ at the Regal in East Greenbush, so yeah there’s tradeoffs. 😀
Chuck The Writer 
Thank you for writing about this. I have used a different captioning system which is available at some theaters. It’s a device with a free-standing screen on a pole that has to be screwed to the seat, so it’s awkward. Captioning glasses sound much less conspicuous and probably a lot more comfortable to use. So, I may go to that same theater and try it, instead of waiting for this movie to arrive on streaming where I can use captions at home.
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