Since it was Twentieth-Century Fox that held the exclusive rights to CinemaScope and they would lease its use to other film producers, some studios preferred to adopt the other systems that suddenly emerged on the market. It was around this time that the term ' Scope' came in to usage as an umbrella term for all the wide-screen processes of differing makes both in America and abroad.
The greatest challenge to CinemaScope's dominance of the wide-screen game was VistaVision; a system developed for Paramount which utilized a larger negative area to achieve higher definition of the image. VistaVision films could be shown in a host of ratios from the reliable 1.33:1 to 2:1. The usual aspect ratio for VistaVision was set firmly at 1:85:1. White Christmas (1954) was the first film to be shot in this process. In the long run, however, VistaVision proved too expensive and fell into disuse. Marlon Brando's optically arresting Western One Eyed Jacks (1961) was one of the final demonstrations of the process at its best.
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| A Hopeful Cagney in VistaVision via The Seven Little Foys (1955) |
And then along came the Todd-AO process. Whey Hey.