When scouting for a location for the premiere of Jason Bourne, Universal Pictures chose Las Vegas, an obvious choice
since it’s the scene of the film’s climactic and chaotic car chase. But finding
a venue large and grand enough to launch the film was another matter – there
aren’t many movie theatres that can accommodate the thousands of celebrities
and industry insiders expected to attend.
Knowing that CinemaCon, the theatrical exhibition industry’s largest
trade event, is held each year at Caesars Palace and that screenings are
successfully done in the Colosseum, Universal felt confident that the 4,000
seat venue could provide a fitting launch pad for the new $120 million action
thriller.
The bigger
challenge: the Colosseum was never built as a movie theatre. Converting the massive room from a live
performance space for the likes of Celine Dion and Rod Stewart into a cinema is
a huge undertaking. Fortunately, there
are experts who tackle the feat each and every year. Since Universal has relied on projection and
sound specialists Boston Light & Sound for over 30 years for major
premieres, they were the obvious choice to produce the event for Jason Bourne. And BL&S principal Chapin Cutler had no
hesitation about who to recommend for the audio system: QSC. Working with the Bob Sandon, technical
director of the Colosseum, and his highly skilled crew, the technical team from
CinemaCon was thus reunited in Las Vegas to once again transform the Colosseum
into one of the world’s largest movie theatres.
Since the
Colosseum is not technically a movie theatre, for cinema presentations a
perforated screen, digital projector, and complete cinema sound system must be
brought in and temporarily installed every time the Colosseum is used for
movies. For the screening of Jason Bourne, a 7.1 audio system was
installed, consisting of three screen channel loudspeaker arrays at Left,
Center, and Right positions behind the screen, twelve subwoofers on the floor,
with four surround channels coming from 22 loudspeakers around the seating
perimeter. Since most cinema
loudspeakers are designed for standard theatres that are rarely longer than 100
feet, QSC used its WL2102s WideLine line arrays suspended behind the screen to
reach the farthest seats in the 120-foot Colosseum. Although line arrays are not typically suited
for the architectural design of conventional movie theatres, in this case, the
wide horizontal coverage provided by the line arrays proved an ideal match for
the Colosseum’s semi-circular seating area.
Surround sound was delivered by sixteen QSC SR-5152 and ten QSC SR-1030
surround loudspeakers along the side walls, and six stacks of three WL3082
WideLine loudspeakers with GP212-sw subwoofers positioned along the rear of the
mezzanine seating area. QSC DPA-Q Series
power amplifiers were used throughout for all loudspeakers controlled by a
Q-SYS Core 3100 processor for all signal processing and routing. For projection, BL&S chose the Barco
Alchemy DP2K-32B projector, receiving digital content from a Dolby/Doremi
ShowVault server. Images were projected
on to a 70-foot Harkness Perlux 180+ screen.
“Our company and I
have worked for many years with QSC both in cinema installations as well as our
annual conventions in Las Vegas,” says Chapin Cutler, who, along with Larry
Shaw, founded Boston Light & Sound in 1977. “We could not have produced
this event as smoothly and as technically perfect without their assistance and
support. Our events with QSC are always well designed and executed, thanks to
Jon Graves, Danny Pickett, and the entire QSC team. Technically, without their
support, this event would not have been anywhere near as dramatic as it was.
For movie sound, intelligibility is king. If the audience can’t understand the
dialogue, we have let them down. With the QSC system we used at the Colosseum,
we more than hit our marks.”
Jason Bourne premiered in Las Vegas on July 18,
2016 at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace, a venue known well to QSC. It’s the fifth film in the Bourne franchise
that’s based on characters created by Robert Ludlum and has grossed over $1B
worldwide. Jason Bourne was number one at the box office over its opening
weekend, and has already grossed almost $200 million worldwide.
