Why cinema has run at the same frame rate for almost a century and what happens when directors try to change it.
Almost all mainstream cinema since the late 1920s has been shot and projected at 24 frames per second. The choice of 24 was, originally, an arbitrary one — the early sound-era studios standardised on the rate as the minimum required to deliver acceptable audio reproduction with the period's film stocks. The standard has persisted for nearly a century, despite multiple attempts to displace it.
This essay tries to lay out why 24fps has been so durable and what happens when directors try to change it.
24 frames per second produces a specific visual phenomenon: motion blur. Each individual frame is exposed for approximately 1/48th of a second; objects moving across the frame produce a slight blur that the audience reads as photographic-cinematic motion. The blur is not, strictly, an artefact — it is, structurally, what cinematic motion has looked like since the sound era began. Audiences have, across roughly four generations, been trained to read motion blur as 'how movies move.'
Higher frame rates (48fps, 60fps, 120fps) produce significantly less motion blur. Each frame is shorter; the image is sharper at each instant. The result, on screen, is a visual register that audiences typically describe as 'soap opera-like' or 'too clear' — the absence of blur reads as the absence of cinematic quality. The standard videotape-based television production of the 1970s and 1980s was shot at 30fps interlaced (effectively 60 fields per second); the high-clarity register became associated with cheap-television production.
The first major attempt to shift mainstream cinema to higher frame rates was Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012), released in 48fps in select theatres. The 48fps version was technically impressive — the visual clarity was significantly higher than conventional 24fps, the motion was visibly smoother, the digital effects were more-cleanly-integrated.
Audiences mostly rejected the format. Critical and audience response to the 48fps version was substantially worse than to the 24fps version. The visual register that the higher frame rate produced read, to most viewers, as either video-game-like or television-soap-opera-like. The two subsequent Hobbit films were also released in 48fps but the format produced no significant cultural shift. By 2014, the major studios had effectively abandoned the 48fps theatrical experiment.
The most-ambitious subsequent attempt was Ang Lee's 120fps work on Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (2016) and Gemini Man (2019). Both films were shot in 120fps, 4K, 3D — a technical specification that, in 2016, almost no theatre could project. The few theatres that could project the format reported visually striking results; the broader audience saw downsampled versions in conventional 24fps 2D.
Both films were commercial failures. The technical experiment produced no measurable shift in audience expectations. Lee has subsequently moved away from the 120fps project. The structural lesson seems to be that the audience reception to higher frame rates is not a matter of unfamiliarity that will diminish with exposure; it is a structural preference rooted in nearly a century of training.
The 24fps standard has, in some sense, become the structural marker that distinguishes theatrical cinema from television production. Most prestige television (House of Cards, The Crown, Succession) is shot at 24fps despite no technical reason to do so. The choice is signaling — the producers want the work to read as cinematic rather than as television. The 24fps register is, by 2026, the audible-visible signature of high-production-value moving-image work.
The streaming-platform era has complicated this slightly. The major platforms increasingly produce work that is, in production terms, indistinguishable from theatrical cinema; the 24fps standard has been preserved across the transition. What has changed is the broader television production landscape: lower-budget television production has largely moved to 24fps, while live-broadcast television (sports, news, soap operas) retains the higher frame rates that the cinema-vs-television distinction had previously preserved.
The structural implication is that mainstream theatrical cinema is, for the foreseeable future, going to remain a 24fps format. Directors who want to experiment with higher frame rates can do so for specific dramatic effect within otherwise-24fps films (Peter Jackson's Hobbit work suggests it is possible) but cannot, in commercial terms, transition the entire production. The audience reception to 24fps is, by 2026, a structural feature of mainstream cinema rather than a technical convention that might be displaced.
For more on technical-cinematic conventions and their commercial reception, see our essays on the IMAX format and why blockbusters look the same.