Hollywood’s Dark Age: Where did all the color go from the movies? | Evil: for good

WWe all know the late-night effort to find something to watch, flipping between streaming services until we settle on a series someone at work mentioned. After a few minutes, you find yourself closing your eyes, adjusting the lights, or fiddling with the TV settings – it’s a night scene and you can’t understand what’s happening. Asking the question: “When did everything on the screen become so dark?”

This question isn’t new, having gained traction after a few incredibly poorly lit battle scenes in the final season of Game of Thrones, with articles and posts popping up asking for an explanation, with one Reddit user commenting: “If you need an article to defend that not being able to see bullshit is a stylistic choice, then maybe the stylistic choice should be reconsidered.”

Film critic and journalist Barry Levitt feels strongly about this topic. “If you walk outside on a warm day, you’ll find infinitely more color than you would in a contemporary blockbuster film.”

Last year’s biggest movie, Wicked, received widespread criticism for the way it looked on screen, even compared to a TV commercial. It’s also hard to refrain from criticism when The Wizard of Oz, a film often credited with changing film forever, serves as the first in this cinematic universe.

The long-awaited sequel Wicked: For Good was similarly criticized. In his review for The New Yorker, Justin Chang asked: “Why is everything in this film, despite its gilded, emerald-encrusted design, either so dim or so bright—so blindingly backlit that it looks like Oz is under perpetual thermonuclear attack, or so vague that you can barely tell the difference between a monkey and a munchkin?”

Technicolor, used in the film The Wizard of Oz, allowed extremely vibrant colors to be captured by a specialized camera that splits the light entering into blue, green and red. These were sent to separate slices of black and white film, with these packages being combined in post-production into the deep, saturated colors we’re accustomed to. But its cost and complexity led to its decline as technology advanced.

“The prevalence of flat, monotonous images in films and television today is due in part to changes in camera technology and the lack of careful color grading work.” says Laura Hillard, lecturer in cinematography at the University of Salford.

Modern digital cameras capture what you see in a more realistic way without the stylistic saturation and texture that was inevitable with film. Some credit The Lord of the Rings with marking a turning point in visual effects, with the use of grading and editing to blend them as organically as realistically as possible. And many of us will remember that from the pre-digital era, 1991’s The Addams Family was one of many films able to depict dark, gloomy environments and moods without any struggle to understand what was happening on screen.

“What I’m noticing these days, if we call it a trend (although I prefer to think of it as a specific stylistic trend), is a move toward lower contrast, softer highlights, more muted color palettes, and a less pronounced lighting pattern.” “And while it may seem easy, there’s usually a lot of work behind achieving this kind of natural look, just like there is with traditional and stylized lighting,” says Hutan Hagšinas, a digital colorist with credits on the 2016 film The Salesman.

“There’s sometimes a misconception that darker images are just a cost-saving strategy in lighting or production design. This may sometimes play a role, but it’s not necessarily true,” he adds. “We are simply in an era where filmmakers have more control and freedom over the final image than ever before,” Hagshnas believes.

It’s not just technology. John Constantino, producer and director, explains that the film’s visuals can be a battle between “abstraction and immersion.” With abstraction being something that “it’s so obvious that you’re watching a depiction of something on screen that you have to use your imagination to connect it, often it takes a few minutes to get there but then you’re all the way there” and immersion is “a trend that began at the dawn of digital, usually involving a wider-angle array of camera lenses, with cameras placed closer to the action” She intends to make you feel like you’re there, experiencing that reality on screen.

Constantinou speculates that an immersive approach has been taken for Wicked, putting you in the same experience as Glinda and Elphaba – which was confirmed in an interview with director Jon M Chu. “I think what we wanted to do was immerse people in the city of Oz, to make it a real place,” he said.

“There is a strong creative preference at play. Many filmmakers want a visual world that feels grounded, atmospheric, and emotionally honest. Dark images can add tension, intimacy, and realism,” echoes Hagchinas.

Not only did Wicked experience visual criticism, but Frankenstein’s lighting seemed inconsistent with its intended gothic undertones, with many believing it looked like a video game, as opposed to Nosferatu, another gothic horror creature fascinated by its elaborate use of lighting and dark tones. Decider’s review of Frankenstein noted, “It’s that signature Netflix flatness in lighting and focus, a lack of contrast that makes surfaces stick together across every focal length. Few of the elements on screen feel real and tangible, and for a movie about blood and nerve, that’s a problem.”

“This Significant Flatness of Netflix” becomes more of a commentary on the problem of the growing dominance of streamers in Hollywood. Vice delved into this topic three years ago, and found that Netflix had restrictive lists of approved cameras, and wanted to shoot all content in 4K UHD, ready for when 4K TVs became the norm in the home. Despite the similarity to the jump from digital to film, compressing 4K data into something that can be viewed on a regular TV also results in something strange and completely unrealistic. Not much has changed since then — last year Esquire singled out a takedown of the streamer’s “weird visual language.”

Meanwhile, many series and films have failed in their attempt to capture the darkness through criticisms of Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, The Handmaid’s Tale and The Batman.

Our home TV technology has evolved rapidly (even if it’s not progressing on Netflix’s schedule), and it’s also affected how visuals are interpreted on screen. Hagchinas recognizes that we are now able to “see and appreciate subtle textures that would have been lost a decade ago. So filmmakers now have a real incentive to craft detailed, tactile images, knowing that display technology can support those nuances.” Even if immersion is the goal, it can be lost when viewers want to play with the settings and lighting at home.

“Lighting challenges have always been there, regardless of the aesthetic trends of the time.” Hagshnas says. It’s hard to predict future on-screen trends – we’ve seen 3D viewing come and go, and meanwhile immersion seems to be reaching new heights with the Las Vegas Sphere hosting an AI-enhanced version of The Wizard of Oz, claiming it will “transport audiences, making them feel like they’ve stepped inside the movie”.

Response to Cho’s use of color in Wicked: For Good has been mixed. Levitt acknowledges that although it “has more color than most, it’s still strangely muted” while David Crowe of Den of Geek believes that the lighting and color issues are “more apparent” in the sequel. Maybe it’s bad timing – the color universe has its biggest expansion in a very colorless time in cinema.