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Why there are black bars: fit, zoom or stretch?
The critic
Black bars appear when a film's shape and your screen's shape differ, and every fix costs something: fit keeps the whole picture and the bars, zoom crops the edges, stretch distorts the proportions.
This explainer lets you try all three on a 1.37, 1.85, 2.39 or IMAX shape, on a 16:9 TV or a 21:9 screen, and explains why the bars sometimes move mid-film.