Wicked director Jon M Chu is encouraging audience members to ask their cinema to turn up the volume on his blockbuster musical, as some viewers have begun reporting sound issues.
Posting on X on the evening of Wicked’s US opening, Chu wrote: “Tell your movie theater to turn it up to a 7 … I’ve gone to a couple screenings and they are more like a 6.4. If you want it the way it was intended 7 is the way.”
His comment refers to sound levels for the Dolby audio systems, used by many major cinema chains and independent movie theatres worldwide.
Universal Pictures’ adaptation of the Tony award-winning Broadway smash, based on Gregory Maguire’s novel of the same name, is already proving popular with audiences, taking $114m in North America and an additional $50.2m internationally over the weekend, bringing its global total to $165m – the fourth-largest start in history for a musical.
But while reviews for Wicked have been overwhelmingly positive, some have taken to social media to complain about the sound.
Among the hundreds of replies to Chu’s post were many individuals who said the volume was too low at the screening they attended, or that they could not hear all of the lyrics under the orchestral score, though others reported no issues.
Dolby even responded to Chu’s post, writing, “We’ve got you covered” – though some commenters disagreed. “I don’t think you do. We were at a theatre with Dolby and the sound was super quiet,” posted one frustrated viewer.
Alex Temesvari, general manager of the Hayden Orpheum movie theatre in Sydney, which uses Dolby audio systems, said there hadn’t been any requests so far from audience members wanting the volume turned up on Wicked.
“There are no issues on our end with bumping the levels up when we occasionally get this request from a director or studio,” Temesvari said, adding that sound bleed was not an issue in the six-screen complex. “Our levels are tested by our tech team and we have invested heavily in our presentation over the last few years so [there are] rarely any issues with sound or picture.”
Imax Melbourne, which features the cinema chain’s proprietary 12-channel sound system, said there had been no requests for higher volume from Wicked audience members so far.
“But we are different from that mainstream cinema experience, in that the sound is always one of the things we pride ourselves on,” Imax general manager Jeremy Fee told the Guardian. “We are generally larger than a commercial or suburban cinema.”
Neither Hoyts or Event cinema chains in Australia, both of which use Dolby sound, had responded to a request for comment by time of publication. Palace, a smaller cinema chain with theatres around Australia, declined to comment.
For blockbusters such as Wicked, Imax also typically works with film-makers to digitally remaster the movie for the Imax cinema environment. As part of that, they set the sound levels for across the Imax network. “We get given a DCP – digital cinema package – and it’s already set at a predetermined level for us,” says Fee. “On occasion, we might get an instruction to turn the sound up – across the Imax network – but for this one, no.”
It’s not unprecedented for audiences to complain about sound: one director who attracts criticism is Christopher Nolan, with films including Interstellar, The Dark Knight Rises and Tenet variously described as being too loud, too quiet or too muffled.
Nolan has resisted the criticism, telling author Tom Shone for his book The Nolan Variations: “I actually got calls from other film-makers who would say, ‘I just saw your film, and the dialogue is inaudible.’ Some people thought maybe the music’s too loud, but the truth was it was kind of the whole enchilada of how we had chosen to mix it … if you mix the sound a certain way, or if you use certain sub-frequencies, people get up in arms.”
