Yet I have exactly the opposite pet peeve.
TCM was the first cable station to insist on "widescreen", which I call "ribbon TV".
It's utterly ludicrous to have 2/3 of your screen area be black bars. If you want to buy it that way, fine, but the majority of us still have standard TV aspect ration screens.
That's why letterbox VHS was highly unpopular.
That's why they make "fullscreen" DVDs. As a Laserdisk owner, I strongly believe the unpopularity of that media was due to the fact that many movies were only available in "ribbon TV". Ribbon TV killed the Laserdisk. I can tell you for sure that I never bought ONE widescreen Laserdisk, and I have something like 60 - 70. They could have sold me double that amount for a properly formatted picture.
Even though I have a 54" TV, giving up 2/3 of the screen is silly. Very little is typically happening on the extreme edges. Most of it is the "panorama", "sweeping drama" type effect, and it's negligible to me.
I'm not running an effete art theater, I'm watching TV.
You're watching only 1/2 to 2/3rds of the film!! Do you get a discount for that? If the pic is too small, move your chair a little closer. Sheez!!
Good movies use the entire frame. What's missing very often alters the actual content of the scene. If a character is isloated by the director in the corner of the frame to show their alienation you will not see that if they are panned to the center of the frame. Throw on 'Rebel Without a Cause', 'Ben Hur' or 'Lawrence of Arabia'. They are literally unwatchable in 'slice and dice' (pan and scan).
You're not watching the same movie. A good director puts everything into a shot for a reason. As soon as someone messes with that, the effect of the cinematography is changed, and always for the worse.