Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: In-Flight Entertainment

Episode Date: March 11, 2026

Movies on planes have changed a lot in the last couple of decades. Today, we'll go over how this stuff works. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Search Plagrant and Funny with Kerry Champion and Jamel Hill. And listen now. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of Eye Heart Women's Sports. Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here sitting in for Dave, and this is Short Stuff about in-flight movies, all the great stuff that you can watch when you fly with your favorite airline.

Yeah, and this is something that if you've been flying for a number of years, has changed quite a bit. Yeah. I do remember the old days where I didn't fly a lot growing up at all, like I think I flew one time before I went to college. And then not even a lot after that because I was always broke. But I did go on a couple of flights back in the day where they had the one movie being shown for the entire plane. And there were these big, huge, like, Volkswagen Beetle-sized monitors that dropped down from the ceiling, like every 10 rows right in the middle.

And maybe 30% of the flight could get a good angle on that screen. Yeah. And if you were lucky, you were close to that one big screen version that was, like, broadcast or shown on like the wall. Oh yeah, yeah. In the middle rows. Yeah, that was how we used to watch movies. Everyone watched the same movie at the same time.

You plugged in your headphones that were like hydraulics, if I remember correctly from our air travel episode. It's like just through a tube. Yeah, and you watch that same movie. And because there's all sorts of different people with all sorts of different tastes, the movie you saw was radically different from the movie that you would find on like your, at your, you're, video store. Yes, for sure. One movie, Whole Plain, we will tell you the very first

in flight movie, believe it or not, was in 1929. It was a newsreel in a couple of cartoons on a transcontinental air transport flight. But real deal movie service started in the early 60s. This comes from variety and CNN and how

stuff works. But nowadays, it's a whole different deal because we have broadband connections. We have servers on board. Everyone knows now you can stream like over a hundred movies probably. Even a couple of decades ago, you probably just had 10 or 15 movies you could watch because they were just stored on a hard drive, I guess. But now they have all kinds of movies. You can play games against passengers. You can read e-books, listen to podcast or music or whatever. Right there, either on the seatback screen or on your laptop or tablet or

whatever. Yeah. It is quite a time to be alive for that. But the, I guess the whole problem, the whole issue that faced airlines back in the day, which was how can you show a movie to a bunch of different people, is still around in different forms. Yeah, for sure. I mean, it costs them a ton of money. Apparently, some airlines spend like $20 million per year just on licensing the content. Then you got to outfit the planes. That can cost about $5 million per air. aircraft. And it makes it a lot heavier. So there was a guy, an econ professor in Norway, that basically calculated all the weight and everything and said, if airlines got rid of this stuff, they can save about $3 million per year per aircraft by not having this on board.

Right. Which, I mean, they're like, well, so what? We make so much more than that. Yeah, but they'd pass along the savings to us, I'm sure. For sure. Yeah, of course. Apparently, depending on where you are, I think in the United States, you pay something like 90 grand for one movie for a couple of months. Yeah, for license. And then other, yeah, for license. And then other licenses are like by a per view. So every time somebody watches a movie, you have to pay a certain amount. Probably not 90 grand. But still, like, there's all sorts of different ways that airlines have to kind of dig in their pockets to make sure you have all the movies you want. So feel bad for the airlines. Yeah. I don't know if this is for everybody, but I even call them airplane movies. It's sort of like a hotel movie. It's a movie that I normally wouldn't pay for or go see in a theater, but I will totally get, like, had enough interest to watch it. I will do that on airplanes almost 100% of the time. I won't watch either that or like an old favorite. But I watched F1, the Brad Pitt Formula One movie on this last flight recently. And it was okay. It was an airplane movie. Too much minimalist office stuff for me.

Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, it was lousy with that. I saw some, I was watching it over somebody's shoulder. Yeah, there was a lot of that. I mean, the racing stuff was really, really great. I'm sure, obviously, much better on a big screen. But it was one of those where, like, not most, but a lot of people don't understand Formula One racing.

So the entire time, like, the race commentary was so explanatory. And now he has to go. do this because that means this because the rules say this. And it's just incessant. And it helped you understand it. But it was really pretty, pretty bad. Like inception? In that respect. Yeah, like inception. Let's take a little break. And we'll come back and we'll talk about some of the stuff that airlines have to do to make sure that no one gets offended by their movies. All right. We'll be right back. If you're trying to keep up with everything happening on and off the court, we've got you

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Listen to Mostly Human on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. All right, so you were saying airplane movies are ones that, you would normally never pay you to see. I get that. There's also airline versions of movies. Yeah. And they come in a bunch of different ways. Sometimes the airlines like commission companies to edit the movies that they're going to show. Other times, the studios themselves will make an airline cut where they edit out, you know, the sexiest stuff or the most violent or gory stuff or like jokes. Like you probably couldn't show any of the Austin Powers movies.

because of all the mean stuff about different cultures. They figure out how to edit that out in the best way possible so that it doesn't screw up the plot, which was not what they were doing before when they showed the same movie to everybody at the same time. It was just really clumsy editing then. Yeah, for sure. It's kind of funny.

Some of the things I'll edit out. Apparently they'll add out other airline logos, which I didn't know, which is hysterical. not so hysterical. You're never going to see a movie about a terrorist or certainly like a hijacking or a plane crash or anything. You're not going to see that Denzel Washington movie. Like you're not going to see anything like that,

which makes a lot of sense, of course. Sure. But depending on where you are in the world, too, there's different cultures that are going to find different things offensive. And you've got to be aware of that. So like in Europe, they're way more okay with like a little bit of nudity, maybe a little bit more sexy stuff, but they're not as much as into the gore and violence.

The Middle East, apparently, any kind of bearskin or sexy stuff you can't have, but they have a little higher tolerance for violent scenes on their flights. Right. Airlines that carry a lot of Muslim passengers will frequently have, like, any references to pig or pork or anything like that edited out.

Yeah. Singapore apparently is sensitive to scenes or movies with LGBTQ plus content, which means they can't get enough of it is what I'm reading. I don't think that's the case. And language, you would think like, well, they got to edit that out. But that's not the case anymore. It doesn't seem to have been the case ever since they started showing on-demand

individually selected movies because you listen to them through headphones generally. Yeah, through headphones. And also they have the little sort of caveat now where they tell you beforehand, this contains scenes of, you know, violence. or whatever, brief nudity, and you have to tell whether or not you want to proceed beforehand. And, you know, I think because I was, I'm still a bit of a prude, I was raised Baptist, so I'm always very sensitive to other people's experience around me. Like, I would never be the guy that's just watching some awful, like, thing on their screen

with people all around them, just totally clueless that, like, kids are around or other people that might be offended. So I've always been sensitive to that, but there are, there's an actual trade. group, the airline passenger experience association, because there are no laws about this, they will offer guidance, I guess, to movie distributors and to airlines and stuff like that. There have been some sort of, I don't know about famous, but at least gone viral online for like, how could they edit that out? I know when the film Carol came out in 2015, which is about a lesbian couple in the 1950s,

Delta got a lot of guff because they edited out scenes of like women kissing. and so Delta was like, hey, that's not us. Like, that's the movie they gave us. But apparently there's a guy who runs a company that How Stuff Works Talk to, Amir Samnani. He's vice president of content services for Global Eagle, which is like the big company that edits films for airlines. Yeah. He had said, he wasn't saying this to contradict Delta, but he said like airlines actually have a lot. of say in what gets edited out. So it seems like Delta was like, no, we can't show lesbian stuff,

whereas American Airlines and United are like, they're all like, they're like Singapore. They're like bringing it on. Right. Yeah, there was, in 2007, there was a co-sponsored bill called the Family Friendly Flies Act where they wanted to have child safe viewing areas on the planes where anything over G couldn't be played. But I think it never passed. And I, and I, I've, I'm sure it didn't pass because that's a near impossibility or just a terrible idea to be like, we'll put all the kids in the back of the plane together without their parents. I was looking at this and there was congresspeople, congressman from North Carolina, and it does especially today sound just preposterous.

But in their defense, this was 2007 and this was a time when planes still mostly showed the same movie to the entire airplane at the same time. Well, that makes sense, a little more sense. Right, it did. It did to me, too. And I was reading, like, just basically an article on it from the time. And they were like, well, one of the problems is, it's like, you don't want to just show only G-rated movies because everybody on the airplane is going to hate kids even more than they already do. That was a quote from it. So they landed on if this did happen to just show PG-13 as a compromise.

Yeah, all right. Well, that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, and if you're wondering how much gets edited out, someone actually did check running times of movies shown on Virgin Air and Air Canada. They had funding. That's right, which will be flying soon when we do our Canadian tour. We got some Air Canada flights book. Can't wait.

You got that straight. And they found that two-thirds of the movies shown on these two airlines were the same length as the theater presentation. 14% were shorter, not 14% shorter, but 14% of the movies overall. So that just sort of tells you how many movies are being edited down for content. 21% were longer, which is sort of interesting. Yeah, I would guess Virgin is not huge on editing down movies, but you never know. You never know. So, yeah, Chuck said you never know.

I guess Chuck doesn't that mean that short stuff is out? Indeed. Stuff you should know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts to My Heart Radio, visit the IHeartRadio app. or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.