I don't want to lose 1/4 of the picture just so it'll fit neatly on my screen without black bars. The worst is when the first HD release of a program mastered on film is in 16:9, so we never get the full picture in HD and have to choose between higher resolution and seeing the whole damn picture
back in the long ago times, I was like an 8 year old watching Star Wars on cable TV and it was in "letterbox" which was uncommon enough that at the commercial breaks the station liked to remind us.
I asked my father, who I believed to be a genius, "why don't they just do this for all movies?" and he said, "the black boxes are annoying to look at."
it was a pivotal moment in my development, because that is when I realized adults could be fools.
But you're not looking at the black boxes, you're looking at the movie!