1) Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium will become the first Sony film mixed both for Dolby Atmos and for Barco’s rival Auro 11.1 format. Meanwhile, the British theater chain Vue said it is currently “testing” Atmos in its select Xtreme auditoriums, while Barco signed a 15-picture deal with DreamWorks Animation. The two companies are hoping that their products will coexist in theaters so as to avoid an all-out format war.

2) DreamWorks also announced a potentially controversial coproduction with its Shanghai based Oriental DreamWorks and the state-owned China Film Group to adapt the popular Tibet Code adventure novels for the big screen. Jeffrey Katzenberg, however, denies any political motivation behind the project. The Indiana Jones-esque films will begin production after King Fu Panda 3.

3) Quentin Tarrantino’s Django Unchained will get another chance at the Chinese box office after officials pulled the film from theaters within minutes of its initial release on April 11th. The film will re-open on May 12 with several sexual and violent images likely removed.

4) In streaming news, Amazon.com announced it will soon release a set-top box to compete with Roku and AppleTV. Netflix is adding the option for a single account to stream up to four videos at once.  The current limit is two simultaneous streams. Netflix also unveiled nine new posters for their upcoming season of Arrested Development.

5) NBC renews five of its dramas for next season, including Revolution and Grimm. Meanwhile once-popular shows like The Office and Fox’s American Idol hit all-time ratings lows this past week.

6) In cable news, CNN is in talks to add Stephanie Cutter and Newt Gingrich to its reboot of the network’s once-popular Crossfire debate show. CNN also topped Fox and MSNBC in the 25-54 demo during the Watertown manhunt on Friday.  However, Fox bested all of cable programming in total viewership during the week of the Boston bombing, edging out USA 2.87M to 2.62M.  CNN placed third with 1.99M and MSNBC placed 19th with only 923k.

7) Reddit general Manager Erik Martin admitted he deeply regrets how some of the Boston marathon discussions on his site “fueled online witch hunts and dangerous speculation which spiraled into very negative consequences for innocent parties.” Some media outlets have been critical of the way the website was handling the ongoing investigation, though others were more defensive of Reddit’s involvement.

8) In twitter news, the AP’s twitter feed was hacked with claims of two explosions at the White House, causing the Dow to see momentary drop of about 130 points. The Onion‘s twitter feed responded in form, and has had more than 1,000 re-tweets since its posting. None of this seemed to deter Former President Clinton from officially joining the social media site, nor from making the announcement on The Colbert Report.

9) Disney’s slated film adaptation of Stephen Sonheim’s Into the Woods is inching toward including Meryl Streep and Johnny Depp as leads. The company’s theme parks in Florida and California will also stay open for 24 hours on Friday, May 24th in order to offer visitors an all-nighter to celebrate the beginning of summer.

10) iTunes celebrates its 10-year anniversary, and though some journalists called the online music store an “instant revolution,” analysts suggest it is now losing significant market share to streaming services like Spotify.

1) News Corp’s COO Chase Carey is threatening to turn Fox into a pay cable channel if courts continue to allow the new internet television broadcaster Aereo to profit from its retransmissions of Fox programming. Courts have so far ruled in favor of Aereo twice.

2) The popular social media site and bibliophile hang-out, Goodreads, will soon be under the ownership of Amazon.com. While Amazon VP Russ Grandinetti says this will help self-publishers “promote their books on Goodreads,” a number of Goodreads members are apparently leaving the website to prevent Amazon from monitoring what they are reading.

3) Speaking of good reads, Playboy announced it will start delivering its magazine through a new iPhone application. However, due to the no-nudity policy on iPhones, the app will not include any of the publication’s erotic photos.

4) Dolby announced that several more titles — including Man of Steel and Wolverine — will receive the company’s Atmos treatment later this year. The new 64-channel surround sound format was introduced last summer and has been wired in more than 90 theaters worldwide. As of now Dolby has no plans to make Atmos available for home theaters.

5) Continuing WAYM’s interest in HBO GO’s potential to provide a GO-only subscription, HBO now suggests they are looking to provide live streaming of non-boxing sporting events through their GO service. And in case this should ever come up, if you are a New York Times columnist you should maybe think twice about announcing to your readers that you steal HBO GO from a friend.

6) Continuing WAYM’s interest in covering the potential Hulu buyout, last Friday former News Corp president Peter Chernin made an offer to buy the streaming website for $500 million. Chernin was involved in developing Hulu for News Corp during its launch in 2007. Among other investments, Chernin is also looking to buy Fullscreen, a company that supports and advises creators of online content for websites like YouTube.

7) In Kickstarter news, the Veronica Mars Movie Project has ended its record-breaking Kickstarter run with 91,585 total backers, more than any other project in Kickstarter’s short history. The crowd-sourcing website was also slated to help Roger Ebert re-launch his weekly television show, though those plans have been sadly cancelled.

8) The digital cinema projection company Cinedigm has continued its push to distribute movie and television content by acquiring digital and VOD rights to more than 1,000 episodes of Australian television. Cinedigm is also now conducting DCP instillations on more than 100 drive-in screens across the country.

9) In DreamWorks Animation news, the company has acquired the intellectual property rights to those Troll dolls from yesteryear. The company also appears to be recovering from Rise of the Guardian‘s disappointing release last November, with The Croods currently exceeding $200 million at the foreign box office, making it the second film in 2013 to gross more than $300 million worldwide.

10) The script-thief’s revenge… and does he take requests?

With respect to its mixing capabilities, the Atmos system can send discreet sounds to up to 61 individual speakers and 3 low-frequency subwoofers. This updates Dolby’s recent 7.1 configuration (color-coded below), which consists of three full-range speakers behind the screen, a channel for each side wall, and a left and right channel for the rear wall. Additionally, 7.1 can feed low-frequency effects to an LFE or “.1” channel located behind the screen.

Atmos essentially keeps this 7.1 configuration but adds two more speakers behind the screen, two channels for ceiling speakers, and two additional LFE channels for the theater’s rear corners, creating ostensibly an 11.3 foundation. Generally, this foundation might contain the film’s music, ambient and background sounds, and — in the front speakers — the onscreen dialog and sound effects.

Most importantly, Atmos can send up to 128 sound effect “objects” to any single speaker in the auditorium. Whereas an offscreen bird might emanate from the entire left wall of speakers in 7.1, filmmakers can now mix the soundtrack so the bird emanates first from only the far speaker on the left, then from a front ceiling speaker, then from an adjacent speaker, and so forth if the filmmakers wish to recreate a bird’s circuitous flight through an auditorium. Further, because not every theater wired for Atmos will have the exact same number of speakers, the system can modify where it mixes its sound objects in order for that bird to journey identically through a 37- and 61-channel space.

This new means of mixing sound effects is known as a “pan through array,” and—as Dolby argues—the capability is an extensive improvement over the panning limitations of previous formats. Take for instance this early fly-over effect from the 5.1 mix of Broken Arrow (1996). As the airplane travels through the image from the background to the foreground, the sound pans from the front channels into the rear channels (circled in red below), creating the illusion that the plane is also traveling through the theater.

In Atmos these effects still exist, but the added channels on the sides and ceiling allow filmmakers more control over a pan’s speed and intensity. For example, as we crane toward the tornado in Disney’s Oz: The Great and Powerful (2013; pictured below), the storm’s howls slowly engulf one row of speakers at a time in order to create a more foreboding atmosphere and pace.

However, we should not assume that these chill-inducing aesthetics are how practitioners will continue to mix in Atmos once this introductory period is over. To offer some historical context, when Hollywood first introduced digital surround sound to audiences in the early 1990s, films utilizing these new technologies were also sporting aggressive sound designs. For instance, during the final gun battle from Carlito’s Way (1993) we hear screams, gunfire, and other sound effects, yet when we listen to just the two rear surround channels we hear only guns and bullets.  The inclusion of only these sounds in the surround speakers would seem to create the illusion that bullets are actually whizzing by the heads of filmgoers.

(Here is an excerpt from the battle with every channel activated…

… and here is the excerpt again with only the rear surround channels activated.)

While Carlito’s Way typifies how 5.1 systems sounded during their first few years, such aggressive and kitschy mixes seemed to become passé by the end of the decade, with these more sensory experiences mainly quarantined for science-fiction or war films, and with most panning effects reserved for interplay between only the front speakers. I suspect a similar stylistic trajectory might also happen with Dolby Atmos.

So in lieu of treating aggressive sound mixing as essential to the Atmos aesthetic, we might conceive of the technology’s long-term appeal in two other ways. First, Atmos replaces each theater’s surrounds with higher-quality speakers that are capable of carrying wider frequency ranges. As opposed to previous soundtracks that were stored on 35mm, the increase in data space afforded to Atmos on DCP hard drives can then allow for more audio information and greater textural detail to emanate from these newer speakers. Second, and perhaps more interestingly, there are the ceiling channels. DreamWorks’s The Croods (2013) noticeably utilizes these new locations through its fabrication of reverberation and echo. During the film’s opening egg chase, the filmmakers mix Alan Silvestri’s A-TEAM-esque score so that it “bounces” off the ceiling like it would in a concert hall or indoor stadium. In addition, both The Croods (pictured below) and Rise of the Guardians (2012) feature fireworks and other elevated actions that take advantage of the ceiling’s speakers.

Ceiling channels and more detailed sonic textures are pleasurable additions, but they may pale in comparison to some of the more chill-inducing moments currently offered by filmmakers. If you are curious about experiencing these aggressive sound mixes firsthand then you may want to plan a trip to your closest Atmos theater before this type of aesthetic once again becomes passé.