Put a frame from a 1980s adventure film next to one from a recent superhero release and the difference is immediate. The older image has saturated colour, deep blacks, distinct separation between elements. The newer one is often a wash of desaturated blue-grey with everything at similar brightness.
This is a real and measurable shift, not nostalgia. Several things caused it and they compound.
Colour grading became easy
The most direct cause. Digital colour grading gives a colourist enormous control over the final image — every scene can be pushed towards any palette, cheaply, in post-production.
When something becomes easy and cheap it gets used, and when a look becomes associated with prestige it gets copied. The teal-and-orange grade — pushing shadows blue and skin tones warm — became ubiquitous because it makes actors pop against backgrounds and it's fast to apply.
Fashion then did what fashion does. The look spread until it stopped signalling anything, at which point the reaction was to desaturate further, and now a great deal of expensive film-making arrives in a narrow tonal band.
Green screen forces compromises
A more structural cause. Shooting against a green screen and compositing in an environment afterwards constrains lighting in ways that show up in the final image.
You can't fully light for a scene that doesn't exist yet. The lighting has to be flexible enough to match whatever gets built in post, which pushes towards flat, even, non-committal illumination. Strong directional light with deep shadows is exactly what makes compositing difficult.
So the visual language of heavily digital films tends towards low contrast and diffuse light, not because anyone prefers it but because it's what survives the pipeline.
Darkness hides the seams
The related and less charitable explanation for why so many climactic sequences happen at night, in rain, or in a storm.
Digital effects are considerably more convincing in low light. Detail that would betray a computer-generated creature in daylight simply isn't visible at night. Rain and smoke add atmospheric layers that help blend elements together.
This is a legitimate craft technique and it's also a crutch, and when every third act of every large film takes place in a dark, wet, dust-filled environment, the reason isn't storytelling.
The delivery problem
Here's the part that's genuinely under-discussed. A film is graded on a calibrated reference monitor in a controlled room. It is then watched on a phone on a train, a laptop with a glossy screen, a television with the shop-floor picture settings never changed, in a bright living room.
Content graded for a dark room with an accurate display looks murky everywhere else. That's not a fault in the grade; it's a mismatch between production standards and viewing conditions.
The compression added by streaming makes it worse. Dark scenes are hard to compress efficiently, and low-bitrate delivery turns subtle gradations in shadow into visible banding and blocky artefacts. A scene that reads beautifully in a cinema can become an unreadable smear at home.
Some productions have started grading a separate pass for streaming delivery, which helps and adds cost.
Television settings, seriously
Worth stating plainly because it accounts for a lot of individual complaints: most televisions ship in a mode designed to look bright and punchy under shop lighting, with motion smoothing on and colour pushed hard.
That mode makes films look wrong in specific ways — the soap opera effect from motion interpolation, crushed shadow detail, oversaturated skin. Switching to a filmmaker or cinema mode fixes most of it in about thirty seconds and almost nobody does it.
If you find modern films look strange, try that before blaming the colourist. It may not be their fault.
The pushback
There has been a genuine reaction and it's producing good work.
Directors returning to film stock, which has a distinctive response to light and a colour rendition that's hard to replicate digitally. Practical effects and location shooting where budgets allow. Cinematographers pushing back against uniform grading and defending high-contrast, saturated looks.
Several recent large productions have been notably bold visually, and audiences have responded, which is the argument that carries weight in this industry.
The economics still favour the safe approach — a distinctive look is a risk, and a hundred-million-pound production is not where risks get taken. But there's more variety now than there was five years ago, and it's coming from directors with enough standing to insist.
What to do about it
Calibrate your television, or at least switch off the enhancements. Watch in a dark room if you can. And if a film looks like mud, check whether it looks the same on a different display before concluding the film is at fault.
Half the time it's the delivery chain rather than the film. The other half, it really is the film, and there isn't much to be done except support the ones that look like somebody made a decision.