More than one hundred years of Film Sizes

I think this is the earliest-born person I've ever seen have a personal website like this — 1929 ! https://wichm.home.xs4all.nl/amsterdam1.html

R.I.P. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Rogge

I went ahead and mirrored this entire site, and his YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/MichaelRogge

It’s amazing to think that film / moving images as an art form is only a little over a century old. Painting, sculpture, drawing, etc. are orders of magnitude older.

It also makes me wonder what the future of the form will be. Historically speaking we’re still at the very beginning of it.

Film formats still rule, but I’m curious what comes next. What I’m seeing in the mainstream is large-format 65 mm / IMAX 70 mm film, which feels like a premium big-screen experience, almost too premium to access nearby.

It's great to see Vistavision making a comeback, a perfect format IMHO, exemplified by Hitchcock's Vertigo - https://youtu.be/95o-QM-lz8g

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As I was looking at various film formats, I was reminded of how messy standards are. ~

There are dozens of formats with slightly different sizes and long tails that never fully disappear.

There is almost no rhyme or reason to it and a lot of it feels like it's just been passed down.

After a while, a format can no longer be considered optional. Once again, I see the same pattern with software and I was curious how others view the same phenomenon.

Which standards survived due to inertia? Which lost better alternatives? Where was the emphasis on compatibility over design?