“The charge that we got from Weinstein was that we needed to be prepared to do 100 screens,” said Chapin Cutler, a founder of Boston Light & Sound, the company hired to find and assemble the projectors.

Mr. Cutler said that the hunt began in January and continued through September. (The Weinstein Company plans to release a full list of theaters Thursday or Friday. The film is also currently facing calls for a police boycott because of Mr. Tarantino’s recent remarks about police violence.) Mr. Cutler discovered some worn-out machines in theaters and bought others from service companies. Some projectors dated to the 1950s. Gears, shafts, bearings and rollers had to be replaced, or in some cases the pieces had to be manufactured anew, based on original blueprints.

“We looked around for anybody who was selling them,” said Erik Lomis, Weinstein’s president of theatrical distribution and home entertainment. “We tried to keep it as quiet as possible as to why. Eventually word leaked out why we were looking for them, and then the price went up.”

Both Mr. Lomis and Mr. Cutler declined to comment on what the undertaking cost. Justin Dennis, the principal engineer at Kinora, a Chicago company that specializes in movie theater installations, noted the difficulty of setting a price for equipment that is no longer manufactured. He hazarded that he might charge $60,000 to $80,000 per screen to get the system up and running, not counting any costs for labor at the theater.

Image Quentin Tarantino



Credit... Laurent Cipriani/Associated Press

“We’ve been accused of actually cornering the market on 70-millimeter projectors,” Mr. Cutler said. “It’s probably pretty true. There probably aren’t too many out there that we didn’t find.” Most of them were destroyed, he added, during the conversion to digital projection.