There's a good article floating around on theplaylist.com which summarizes a recent article written by Steven Soderbergh which essentially smacks the cable companies in the face in an effort to demand satisfaction. His gripe is basically over the cropping of super-widescreen movies. Confusion follows...

This is a 2.40:1 movie (Superwide):



And this is the same image cropped to fit a 1.85:1 ratio (widescreen TV ratio):


With the "less" rectangular shape of the 1.85 image size there is less of a horizontal scope. This is achieved by cropping the original image or by opening the matte up, which is essentially taking the black bars off the top and bottom of a super wide film. Open matte can only be achieved through when the director chooses to film this way. The director chooses to shoot in a less wide aspect ratio because it's easy to both crop the image to make it wider for theaters and show the less wide footage on cable networks to fill up a widescreen TV with no black bars.
Most networks especially, cable networks crop the 2.40 to fit the 1.85 so the viewer sees no black bars and is comforted. But some crop it down to 1.33:1 (a square) which is really baffiling.
Phew, it's a confusing issue, and I know I didn't make it any clearer, but this might help. I'm interested to see if Soderbergh addressed the open matte issue.