The fascinating history of inflight entertainment

In 1919, passengers enjoyed the first in-flight meals – pre-packed lunch boxes at three shillings each on a trip from London to Paris.

But they would have to wait another six years for the full mid-air experience, when the first feature-length in-flight movie was shown on the same route on an Imperial Airways’ converted Handley-Page First World War bomber in April 1925.

Passengers on board the Imperial Airways plane showing the world’s first inflight movie. Credit: Getty Images

The picture was The Lost World, an American stop-motion fantasy adventure released two months earlier, and adapted from Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel of the same name. The 106-minute movie told the story of a group of explorers who discover that dinosaurs still walk the Earth, and featured stop-motion special effects by Willis O’Brien, years before he would use them on King Kong. A sign on the side of that groundbreaking flight – containing a dozen or so wicker seats – declared: “World’s first aircraft cinema”. The film was silent, but accompanied by a live orchestra, broadcast over radio from the Berlin Broadcasting Station.

The stunt combined two roaring new technologies, cinema and passenger flight, just a few short decades after two sets of brothers, the French Lumières and the US Wrights, had pioneered their development.

The Mon Ciné French film magazine was sceptical about the British innovation. “Will the airlines decide to install cinemas on board their planes to charm the passengers during the flight hours?” it asked. “This is hardly probable, because the enterprise is not without risks.” After all, the bulky nitrate film reels being hauled on-board were highly flammable.

The bulky film reels were highly flammable, leading newspapers to believe that the idea of screening movies on planes would never take off. Credit: Getty Images

Ultimately, it was the concept – not the celluloid – that caught light. Regular film services were eventually rolled out in 1961, with US pioneers Trans World Airlines advertising: “Don’t just sit there! Fly TWA and see a movie on the way!”

By 1965, a reporter for Life magazine said passengers had got the hang of the newfangled offering. He recalled one occasion where he “encountered turbulence at the gate. Some of my fellow travellers had found out that our feature was Winston Churchill in The Finest Hours, while, at the next gate, TWA’s flight landing at Kennedy had immediate seating for one of the Rock Hudson-vs.-Doris Day epics. Mass defections from the Churchill flight followed.”

As we celebrate a century of airborne entertainment, why are millions of us still choosing to watch films during our flights, despite an ocean of new media alternatives?

“Movies are still incredibly important,” says Dominic Green, president of the Airline Passenger Experience Association (APEX) and director of in-flight entertainment at United Airlines. “They’re still our number one piece of content.”

Emirates was named as having the world’s best inflight entertainment system in the 2024 World Airline Awards by Skytrax.

Eighty per cent of the airline’s passengers engage with the seat-back screens, and at least half of those are staring at old-fashioned motion pictures. The in-flight entertainment market is estimated to be worth about $14 billion. And even Hollywood stars value it. Oscar-winner Jessica Chastain was furious last year when she received $US15 ($24) credit from JetBlue after complaining “that I paid that for your flight entertainment system that didn’t work for the duration of my six-hour flight”.

When it comes to who watches what, Green says it is very hard to predict based on departure point or destination. “The golden rule, we found, is there is no golden rule.”

Action and comedy tend to be the most popular genres, but you might be surprised to hear that horror and thrillers also do well. Whoever chose to screen The Lost World above the world 100 years ago was clearly on to something.

Raphael Girardoni, managing director of customer experience at American Airlines, says that whether you turn left or right when you board is also largely irrelevant: “The content is, I would say, class-agnostic.”

However, says Green: “What we do see is some of that niche content that might be a bit more edgy sometimes performs a bit better in business class because there’s more privacy there.”

A lot of American Airlines passengers, both children and adults, are watching Bluey.

He admits: “I’m one of those creepy people that’s curled up in the corner getting thrills out of watching scary movies on a flight.” At the other end of the spectrum, he also enjoys episodes of Australia’s own animated series Bluey, which was in the airline’s top five most-watched TV shows for the whole of last year.

“We don’t have that many child passengers to account for the viewership, but it’s because a lot of adults like me are dipping into that for a kind of mental break.”

It speaks to passengers’ hunger for lightweight content in the clouds – perhaps after enduring the rigours of travelling to the airport and making it through security. The likes of family comedy Inside Out 2, an in-the-air favourite throughout last year, are the visual equivalent of a tomato juice and packet of pretzels: the perfect tonic as you begin to ascend.

“Barbie did amazingly well and it wasn’t necessarily with the typical audience that would go and see it at the cinema,” says Green. “It was often middle-aged business travellers [looking for] a bit of an escape.”

Oppenheimer was the most popular film for Qantas passengers in 2024.

When it comes to TV, the “comfort factor” is the name of the game, with many travellers choosing to binge-watch old sitcoms such as Friends and The Big Bang Theory (a trend also seen with at-home streaming services). “I myself fall into that category,” says Girardoni. “When I get on board, I’ll watch things that I have seen before, movies like The Holiday [the 2006 rom-com starring Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet].”

United’s top movie title in December was It Ends With Us. “We were wondering whether some of that was to do with all the drama associated with the two main actors,” says Green, of the bitter and now litigious dispute between director Justin Baldoni and his co-star Blake Lively. “Interestingly, Deadpool & Wolverine was number two, which has a relationship obviously [its star Ryan Reynolds is Lively’s husband].” Alien: Romulus and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice were in third and fourth place.

At Qantas, Oppenheimer was the top choice of 2024, beating its Barbenheimer counterpart (Barbie was 2023’s most-watched film). At Delta, both were top of the tree across its 165,000 seat-back screens.

While at cruising altitude, you will not just be subject to jet lag and cabin pressure, but also to movie censorship. Swearing might have been stripped out, while many airlines ask for the logos of rival carriers to be Photoshopped away. For companies based in the Middle East, images of pigs will likely have been redacted. The censoring is usually done by hired agencies, or “in-flight content distribution specialists”, with the approval of the movie-makers themselves.

Qantas customers last year listened to half a million hours of Taylor Swift.Credit: Getty Images

What about films that feature plane crashes? “Generally, we don’t show things that are unsettling in that regard,” says Girardoni.

Overall, explains Green, as a single screen at the front of the plane has been replaced by individual monitors, the need for editing (whether it be “the odd F-bomb or cleavage shot”) has diminished, replaced instead by content “warning slates”. United has 60, preparing viewers for everything from cigarette use to discussions of mental health. He adds that that figure is unlikely to grow further because “we don’t want to make it too messy and complicated”.

He adds that the airlines also have copious data on “not just selections, but also duration by title and completions. We can’t actually tell if a customer falls asleep during a movie without putting a camera or other type of sensor in the seat. But we do capture active exits.” This is when a passenger switches off a film once the credits have started rolling. “That tells us that a customer is still actively viewing, rather than asleep and letting the movie play through the credits and then ending by itself.”

Most film-makers probably give little thought to how their creations are experienced in the sky. Christopher Nolan is famously fastidious about every detail of his process, from the sound mixing to Imax film 1.43:1 aspect ratio. Yet he has allowed Oppenheimer to be watched on the back of a seat.

Qantas seatback screens in premium economy class.

Studios, in consultation with directors and producers, have the final say on what gets shown, and how it gets edited. The aerial audience tends not to have an impact on how movies are made or marketed, but it is a handy extra slice of revenue that film-makers court. Most large studios have specific salespeople dedicated to selling to the “out-of-home” audience. And on 12 February, APEX holds its annual Content Market in Dubai, which unites movie companies with all the major airline buyers.

Some studios will even actively accommodate plane audiences, recording alternative, airline-friendly scenes during filming that can be seamlessly swapped to replace bad language with family-friendly rewrites (the alternative is bleeping or dubbing done in post-production). Meanwhile, increasing numbers of producers and directors are telling airlines they will not accept any changes to their movies whatsoever – it is a matter of take it or leave it.

“I might get into trouble with the studios if I start throwing out names,” says Green, though he is prepared to cite two creatives who used to ban their productions being shown on planes at all, but have had a change of heart.

“One was Fawlty Towers in the UK. It was only a couple of years ago that the BBC got approval from John Cleese for airlines to be able to license that content, 40-something years after it was aired. In the US, Jerry Seinfeld did not feel that the size and quality of the screens that were then available were the right way to show Seinfeld. They’ve both since relaxed those rules, and I think it’s partly because we’re investing in much better quality screens.”

Fawlty Towers only began appearing as a inflight entertainment option 40 years after it first went to air on television.Credit: BBC

The volte-face also comes at the same time as the everyday consumption of content on compact tablets and phones at home has normalised the watching of multi-million dollar productions in miniature.

No-one is arguing that 30,000 feet is the ideal place to appreciate art. But the airlines still believe that we value the experience – observing this in customer satisfaction surveys – and they are responding by investing in new 4K screens, more intuitive software and higher quality content.

Nevertheless, the seat-back movie screen is facing a number of challenges. On the one hand, some youngsters are experimenting with the “rawdogging” trend, popularised online, of travelling on long flights without indulging in any form of on-screen amusement.

“Just rawdogged it, 15 hr flight to Melbourne. No movie, no music, just flightmap (I counted to one million twice),” an Australian music producer wrote in a caption to a viral video on TikTok last year. In January, shooting began on The Entertainment System Is Down, a dark satire set on a long-haul flight on which passengers are compelled to face the agony of being bored.

On the other hand, passengers are choosing from all manner of other options offered by carriers, or are ignoring them all, in favour of using their own devices as airlines usher in fast, free Wi-Fi across their fleets.

Flyers are no longer restricted to movies, and are enjoying podcasts, top-flight TV and music. Qantas customers last year listened to half a million hours of Taylor Swift – the equivalent of 35,700 flights between Sydney and Los Angeles.

In October last year, Qatar Airways launched the world’s first Boeing 777 Starlink-equipped flight, using Elon Musk’s satellite technology to offer TV streaming, live sports, video calling and real-time online gaming free of charge. It remains to be seen whether the offering of such easy and reliable internet will threaten the on-board movie, and a trusty revenue stream for the film studios.

However, one thing is for sure: jet-powered film is still gaining altitude. Sarah Downs, managing director of in-flight entertainment and connectivity at Delta, says: “We expect the next five years will be more transformational than the last 50.”

In January, Delta launched a partnership with YouTube to offer ad-free videos. From next year, its flight attendants will have the ability to send generalised flight information messages to seat-back screens and translate them into a customer’s preferred language.

And artificial intelligence and virtual reality are likely to transform the in-flight entertainment offering once again. Expect an array of choices, personally customised and translated, to be on your screen before you have closed your overhead locker. Green says United is one of several airlines looking into how AI can be used for bespoke customer curation. And do not be surprised if, before too long, air stewards are handing out VR headsets along with the eye masks and hot towels.

Century-old habits, and inventions, die hard. Just like the creatures in The Lost World, the now-prehistoric technology of moving pictures on planes may still be plodding along aeons after its expected demise.

The Telegraph, London