Is 4:3 Making a Comeback?

How we landed on 4:3 in the first place

Aspect ratios are not handed down from nature. They come from whatever technology was available when a format was standardized, and 4:3 is a good example. Early film and, later, the cathode-ray tube television both gravitated toward a shape close to square. A CRT, at heart, wants to be a circle: the electron beam paints a roughly round area, and a 4:3 rectangle is an efficient shape to inscribe inside it without wasting glass or brightness at the corners. The format we now think of as "old" was a compromise with the hardware of its time.

Then widescreen took over, and the reason is more physical than aesthetic. Before stadium seating became normal in theaters, the practical way to give an audience a bigger image was to make it wider. You could not make the screen much taller without the front rows craning their necks and the back rows losing the top of the frame behind other heads. Width was the only dimension you could really grow. The scope and ultra-wide formats of the mid-twentieth century were partly a response to that constraint, and partly a way for cinema to feel different from the television box in the living room.

Stadium seating changed the math. Once every row has a clear sightline, you can make an image feel larger by going taller instead of wider. That removes the original reason widescreen won, and it quietly reopens the door to boxier frames. The comeback is not only taste. It is partly the disappearance of an old limitation.

Where the current wave started

The recent taste for boxy framing did not appear on social media first. It came out of the art-house end of cinema in the mid-to-late 2010s. A run of indie films made the near-square frame feel deliberate and modern rather than nostalgic: Robert Eggers used an almost-square Movietone-style ratio for The Lighthouse, David Lowery boxed in A Ghost Story, and Wes Anderson had already used the old Academy ratio for the 1930s timeline of The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Those were trendsetters, and for a certain generation of filmmakers the boxy frame came to signal something specific: a rejection of the default widescreen look of the last fifty years of Hollywood, in favor of a more crafted, more composed, more "art-house" sensibility. When a young filmmaker reaches for 4:3 today, part of what they are reaching for is that lineage.

The production reality: open gate and the full sensor

There is also a mundane, practical driver that rarely makes it into the aesthetic conversation. Many modern cameras shoot "open gate". They read out the full height and width of the sensor rather than a cropped widescreen slice, and that full sensor area is often close to a boxy ratio. If you shoot open gate, you are capturing the maximum amount of image the camera can give you.

That has a very concrete benefit: a tall, boxy master gives you room to reframe later. You can crop down to 16:9, or crop to 9:16 for a phone, or hold a slice in the middle, all from the same take. Shooting boxy and cropping in post is a more flexible starting point than shooting 16:9 and having nothing above or below the frame to work with.

And once you are already capturing the full sensor, exporting in 4:3 is the path of least resistance. A lot of filmmakers shoot open gate because that is what the camera does most naturally, then simply do not crop in post. The final ratio ends up being a stylistic choice, yes, but it often starts as the shape the hardware handed them.

Why taller frames compose well

Set the trend aside and there is a genuine craft argument for the boxy frame. Audiences do not spend much attention on the far left and right edges of a wide image. The eye lives near the center and scans horizontally. A lot of the extreme width in a 16:9 frame ends up as unintentional negative space, not composed, just there. A taller frame gives you back vertical room that the eye actually uses.

It is kinder to faces and conversation

Wide ratios are wonderful for landscapes, for medium-wide two-shots, and for anything with sweep. They are often awkward for close-ups, where a single face floats in a sea of horizontal dead space. A boxier frame sits more naturally around a face, which is exactly why it suits conversational, character-driven filmmaking. The kind a lot of younger filmmakers are drawn to in the first place.

It lets you build vertical compositions

A taller frame invites you to compose up and down, not just side to side. Eggers's Nosferatu used a boxier-than-widescreen frame partly so he could shoot the Count as a tall, imposing vertical presence, filling the frame top to bottom instead of either cropping the figure or pushing it far back to fit a wide frame. Height is a compositional tool, and widescreen throws a lot of it away.

It feels more intimate

Many people describe a boxy frame as feeling like you are inside the moment, where a wide frame can feel like you are watching from a distance. That is subjective, but it is consistent: bringing the edges closer to the subject reduces the sense of a proscenium and increases the sense of presence. For films built on intimacy rather than spectacle, that is a feature, not a limitation.

The social-media logic

Boxy framing also happens to be shrewd for the platforms these films actually get seen on. A 4:3 clip is a smart middle ground for Shorts, Reels, and TikTok: it is tall enough to take up a meaningful amount of a phone screen without committing to full 9:16 vertical, and it still reads fine if the same cut ends up on a 16:9 television or in a landscape feed. A 16:9 clip, by contrast, becomes a thin letterboxed strip on a phone, too small to hold attention in a vertical feed.

Because a boxy master can be recropped to almost anything, one shoot can service multiple destinations without reshooting or awkward compromises. In a world where the same project is expected to live on a phone, a laptop, and a TV, a squarer frame is simply more portable.

The nostalgia factor is real, and that is fine

There is an emotional dimension too. A generation that grew up on 16:9 experiences 4:3 as a different, slightly foreign perspective, and for many, the shows and movies they watched as kids were in 4:3, so the ratio carries a "cozy," nostalgic charge. That retro association, once a liability, is now part of the appeal. Nostalgia is not a lesser reason to choose a format. It is a legitimate emotional tool, the same way film grain or a particular color palette is.

It is not only 4:3. The boxier-frame family

Zoom out and 4:3 is really one member of a broader shift toward less-wide frames, and in the high end the more dominant ratio right now may be 3:2. A wave of recent films has embraced VistaVision, the old 8-perforation, horizontally-run 35mm format whose native shape is close to 3:2. Part of the pull is the current obsession with IMAX and large formats: 3:2 is an efficient way to optimize an image for large-format presentation without spending true large-format money.

There is almost certainly a halo effect here too. Christopher Nolan and other auteurs have made IMAX and tall, big-negative formats aspirational, and IMAX's 1.43:1 is not far from 4:3's 1.33:1. When the most celebrated films of the moment are getting boxier and taller, that filters down. The indie filmmaker choosing 3:2 or 4:3 is, in part, borrowing the visual grammar of the large-format prestige picture on a small budget.

So: logic, or just a differentiator?

Both, and there is nothing cynical about that. The practical case is real: open-gate capture gives you the boxy frame for free and keeps your reframing options open. Taller compositions serve faces, conversation, and vertical staging better than widescreen. And a squarer master travels across phone, laptop, and TV more gracefully than 16:9. The cultural case is also real: the boxy frame signals a lineage, carries a warm nostalgic charge, and stands out precisely because most people are not shooting that way.

The honest advice is the same as it is for any format decision. Do not choose a ratio because it is trending, and do not avoid one for the same reason. Ask what the frame is doing in your story that another shape could not. If the answer is "keeping the audience close to a face," or "letting me stage vertically," or "servicing a phone-first release from a single shoot," then the boxy frame is earning its place, and looking distinctive is just a bonus you get to keep.