Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania just premiered on Disney+ coinciding with the physical media releases of the film on May 16, 2023. Both ways of watching the movie follow the early digital release on April 18, which made ‘Quantumania’ available for purchase or rent.
But Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania on Disney+ offers an advantage over both digital purchases and physical media.
The advantage, if you want to call it that, is that it can display portions of the movie in a full-screen mode called IMAX Enhanced. Disney+ is the only service that offers IMAX Enhanced, and so watching ‘Quantumania’ from Apple TV, Movies Anywhere, or other platforms will only give you the widscreen aspect ratio, which displays the letterbox format.
The letterbox format is something we’ve grown accustomed to as widescreen aspect ratio movies do not fit exactly into a 16×9 standard HD or 4K TV. To maintain the full image, black areas are added on the top and bottom of the image.
But IMAX Enhanced changes that. A descendant of the giant IMAX cinema screens that engulf viewers both vertically and horizontally, IMAX Enhanced displays a 1.90:1 aspect ratio which allows up to 26% more image on a 16×9 TV.
In Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania, the first instance of IMAX Enhanced is at 13:20 when Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) and his daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) are sucked into the quantum universe. The image jumps to almost the full screen with small strips of black on the top and bottom that are barely noticeable.
Then, the format switches back to widescreen format where we find Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly), Janet van Dyme (Michelle Pfeiffer), and Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) who were separated from the two.
The switch in format does, maybe, subconsciously immerse you more in the scenes. Most of Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania is formatted in widescreen until about 1 hour and 28 minutes where the movie stays in IMAX Enhanced until Scott returns to normal Earth.
There are currently 19 total IMAX Enhanced movies on Disney+. Those include Avengers, Doctor Strange, Iron Man, and Thor films, to name a few. Curiously enough, all of the IMAX Enhanced movies are from Marvel Studios with the exception of Lightyear. We expect Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 3 to be the next IMAX Enhanced title bringing the total number to 20.
