This evening, the live-action Attack on Titan movie was shown at theatres across North America. Some moviegoers have been waiting for this day. The subtitle screw up, though, they could’ve done without.
At tonight’s San Francisco showing, there were reports that a third of the way through the movie, the English subtitles froze on a line of dialogue as the characters continued talking. Which seems like utter hell, especially if you’ve left the house and paid money to see a movie at the theatre.
Kotaku has reached out to the film’s distributor, Funimation, for comment, but did not hear back prior to publication.
Unlike in the past, where subtitles were on each film frame, today’s subtitles are added digitally. The assumption is that this could be an issue with the software or hardware being used to project the film.
The majority of the reports appear to be from the San Francisco screening. Though, the same issue apparently did happen elsewhere in Ohio and Wisconsin. There were also reports (here and here) of the movie being shown free of subtitle snafus, so this is still hard to gauge.
Kotaku reader Daniel Barnes, who attended the San Francisco screening, writes, “Much hilarity ensued as me and a bunch of the other people in the audience began laughing and riffing on it.”
The subtitles froze on that line for the next twenty or thirty minutes as you can see in the stills Barnes snapped to show the extent of subtitle screw-up. Other Twitter users did likewise.
“Our theatre stopped the movie, over an hour into it, and said they were gonna restart from the beginning,” Barnes added. Apparently, most patrons at this screening weren’t interested and were given vouchers instead.
In North America, the movie is slated to run at nearly 300 theatres, and it’s already had a run in local cinemas. If you haven’t already, read Kotaku‘s reviews of Volume 1 and Volume 2.
Top images: Daniel Barnes (Thanks Dan!)
Comments
3 responses to “The Attack On Titan Subtitle Disaster”
Malfunctions happen, it’s not really ‘hell’, just a minor inconvenience. I was seeing a 3D movie at IMAX when one of the two projectors failed (which is a very disconcerting sensation when trying to watch a 3D movie) and they couldn’t get it repaired. Just got a refund and went a different time.
I would have reached out to the cinemas that reportedly had problems to find out what projection system they were running. The problem could be with a particular brand of system.
I saw Harry Potter and the Half Blood prince in 3d at a Shanghai Imax theater where one of the projectors failed. They just turned it off (it was projecting an error message) and it became a 2d session.
Though I imagine that if the subtitle projector had failed the session would have probably been refunded.
Welp… I’ve been waiting for this day!
Why wouldn’t they do a test screening first and catch this issue..? Sounds like it was a software/hardware problem limited to a few cinemas.
Most of the time, the first session of a film IS the test screening, on a cinema level anyway. Cinemas that run a film digitally are given a key that unlocks the film between certain times and dates, and it’s all connected to a monitoring server. Films run at any other time other than authorised scheduled times are red-flagged and are investigated. Test screenings don’t really exist anymore, because studios are concerned about piracy. That being said, the studio could have organised their own testing on a variety of projectors and maybe caught this, but they’ll probably just send a patch :/
I’ve been waiting for this day!