An anamorphic widescreen process developed at Twentieth Century-Fox, CinemaScope played a major role in the adoption of widescreen filmmaking and exhibition internationally in the 1950s. The Fox Film Corporation had experimented with widescreen in 1927–30, having developed the 70mm Grandeur system at that time. Grandeur, like the widescreen systems the other studios introduced in that period, failed to catch on. But by the early 1950s the industrial and cultural landscape had changed: the 1948 US Antitrust Paramount Decision had weakened Hollywood’s oligopoly, attendance at movie theaters had dropped precipitously, television was being popularized, and suburbanization as well as an increase in leisure time were driving an interest in more active forms of recreation in the US. The introduction of the widescreen Cinerama system with the premiere of This Is Cinerama (Merian C. Cooper) on September 30, 1952, suggested that widescreen cinema was newly viable and that it might help reverse the fortunes of the ailing film industry. (The reintroduction of stereoscopic 3-D with the release of Arch Oboler’s Bwana Devil in November 1952 incited a similar rash of interest in that technology.) With CinemaScope, Fox succeeded in introducing a widescreen system that could be used by the studios and disseminated widely. Although the other Hollywood studios were experimenting with rival widescreen processes, MGM, United Artists, Disney, Columbia, and Warner Bros. had all agreed to adopt CinemaScope by late 1953, and the process remained in wide use in the US until Panavision’s anamorphic projection and camera lenses were introduced and embraced in the mid- and late 1950s. CinemaScope also circulated internationally, used both for the exhibition of Hollywood films and for local production, though its impact on production across European and Asian film industries derived more heavily from its adaptation into local systems such as the French Dyaliscope, Japanese Tohoscope, and Hong Kong-based Shawscope (Belton, 1992; Huntley, 1993; Belton, Hall & Neale, 2010; Smith, 2017).

Fox’s research and development department had previously dissuaded Fox president Spyros P. Skouras from pursuing Cinerama – and upon the success of Cinerama’s launch, that unit was instructed to “save the situation” (Bragg, 1988: p. 360). Research Department head Earl I. Sponable and his assistant Herbert E. Bragg had both been with Fox since the late 1920s (Sponable having previously worked with Theodore W. Case to develop the sound-on-film system that would be rebranded as Movietone), and they had both worked on the Grandeur system as well as subsequent experiments with 50mm film. In developing the package of technologies that would constitute the CinemaScope system, their aim was to assemble a widescreen process that would replicate the form of “audience participation” attributed to Cinerama while (taking a lesson from their failed experiment with Grandeur) enhancing the prospect of widespread adoption across the industry by making the system more compatible with existing technology and thereby lowering conversion costs. The Fox engineers initially envisioned using 50mm film for this purpose. But they ended up embracing an anamorphic system featuring cylindrical lenses, which made it possible to compress a broad field of view onto standard 35mm film and yielded a wider projected image than 50mm film. By late 1952, Fox had ordered trial anamorphic lenses from Bausch & Lomb and taken out an option on the anamorphic “Hypergonar” lens that French inventor Henri Chrétien had developed in the 1920s. Some of these lenses were still in existence and Fox made initial tests with a Movietone camera and Hypergonar attachment on December 13, 1952. Weeks later, on February 2, 1953, Skouras announced that all future Fox films would be made in CinemaScope – a major gamble for the studio, made in part to prevent a threatened change in management (Bragg, 1988; Belton, 1992; Huntley, 1993; Belton, 2010; Rogers, 2013).

Although Chrétien’s designs were already in the public domain, Fox’s deal with the inventor (finalized on February 10, 1953) enabled the studio to acquire his lenses and, in historian John Belton’s words, “thus gain a temporal advantage over potential rivals, who would have to begin the lengthy process of designing and constructing cylindrical lenses from scratch. The use of existing Hypergonar lenses enabled Fox to commence the actual filming of CinemaScope productions by mid-February 1953.” (Belton, 1992, p. 122) Beginning on March 18, 1953, Fox held well-received industry screenings of demonstration footage, including footage from upcoming CinemaScope releases The Robe (Henry Koster, 1953) and How to Marry a Millionaire (Jean Negulesco, 1953). Fox’s first CinemaScope release, The Robe debuted at the Roxy Theatre in New York on September 16, 1953. A year later, over 8,000 theatres in North America and over 4,000 theatres in Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, and Australia had been equipped for the system. Despite other studios’ adoption of Panavision’s anamorphic camera lenses as early as 1959, Fox continued branding CinemaScope films into the mid-1960s; its final CinemaScope release was In Like Flint (Gordon Douglas, 1967) (Belton, 1992, “Highlights in the History of CinemaScope”).