Tom Cruise's much-needed advice for making movies look normal on TV is going viral again

Have you ever gotten a new TV and tried to watch a movie , only to find that your fancy, high-definition television makes movies look like soap operas? Or maybe you've been at a friends house and noticed that their television makes movies look weird—somehow less real and yet more real at the same time—totally ruining the movie-watching experience ?

Those of us who are fans of cinema-quality film can find ourselves driven mad trying to figure out what settings to change to make movies look normal. We're not the problem, though. Television manufacturers have made it notoriously hard and completely unintuitive to figure out how to change the default setting that creates the "soap opera effect."

Actor Tom Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie created a PSA in 2018 explaining what causes movies to look so strange on newer TVs and how to change the settings to fix it. It comes down to "video interpolation" and "motion smoothing," but that doesn't mean much when you're looking through the settings of your TV to try make movies look like movies.

They offer a simple solution: Just Google "Turn off motion smoothing [insert your TV brand here]."

The reason they can't just give a blanket solution is because every TV manufacturer—Samsung, LG, Vizio, Sony, etc.—has a different name for the setting (TruMotion, Auto Motion Plus and so on), and the setting is found under different menus on different TVs. Splendid.

Why no one who manufactures and tests televisions noticed that the feature made movies look weird and why no one realized that turning the feature on as the default and then making it hard to find and change would be a problem are questions for the ages. The default settings might be great for sports viewing but for TV shows and movies, yuck.

If you're confused or curious about what exactly is happening to create the soap opera effect, Vulture has a brief but excellent explainer video :

As the video explains, it has to do with frames per second and the way televisions process the images at various frame rates. The motion smoothing feature is actually inserting extra frames in order to "smooth" the way motion looks on the screen, but the effect on movies just feels "wrong."

Having an example can help, but even in a side-by-side of a normal movie-watching experience vs. one with motion smoothing, the difference is hard to see, especially if you're on a mobile or computer screen. It's when you're experiencing the full larger screen movie experience that the difference is obvious, but here's a side-by-side comparison :

Oddly enough, people might assume that because the motion-smoothing effect seems to have a better "quality" and higher resolution that it's somehow better. For movies, it's really not. The way movies are created, they are designed to be viewed without that feature. Some people might prefer it, but for some of us watching a movie with motion smoothing is like the visual equivalent of fingernails across a chalkboard.

Thank you, Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie for verifying that new TVs make movies look weird and attempting to save us from the abomination of it all.