The best-of-both-worlds option may be projecting movies at variable frame rates, showing slow scenes at 24 fps and ramping the frame rate up to 48 fps for action scenes. frame rate could become a stylistic choice, just like lighting or set direction. Douglas Trumbull, who worked on the visual effects of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner, developed a 60 fps, 65mm process in the late 1970s. It never caught on, but he's returned to the idea in recent years. Trumbull's website describes a camera system he's designed that could popularize variable frame rate filming:
"I have been shooting at 120 fps, using a 360-degree shutter in the camera. This makes it possible to digitally merge any number of adjacent frames in order to recover the appropriate amount of blur necessary for 24 fps display. Keep in mind that the movie medium we are accustomed to has used a 160-200 degree shutter, resulting in the "texture" that we know as movies (not television). Having shot material at 120 frames with a 360-degree shutter, it is a simple and perfect conversion to digitally merge three frames into one, and delete the next two frames, thus resulting in a 24 frame movie without any artifacts, and while retaining the normal blur. This patented process will provide a compression of visual data that will bring immense improvement to the viewing experience, and also offers the unique opportunity to "embed" 60 fps object motion within a 24 fps overall "look", thus preserving the cinematic texture while enabling unblurred fast action."