Cinema is Losing Its Color

Watch any movie released in the past five years. Now try to remember what you saw.

You might remember if the movie had a distinct visual identity or a story that surprised you. But probably, you won’t.

The problem starts before the story even begins. Modern films heavily rely on muted and desaturated color palettes. Every frame is covered in the same gray-teal-orange haze. This color grading used to be a technical trick—digital cameras in the early 2000s struggled to render accurate skin tones, and the orange-teal grade helped balance them in post-production. Now it’s just the default. This “orange and teal” look manipulates shots to have teal-toned backgrounds and skin tones that stand out in orange. That specific color grading choice is everywhere, from superhero movies to thrillers to comedies. Blue and yellow are complementary colors on the color wheel, which is why they work together visually. But when every single blockbuster uses this same orange-and-teal grade, where skin tones are pushed warm and backgrounds are cooled into blue-green, movies stop looking like unique works of art. In 2015, Priceonomics found that the orange-and-teal grade had quietly become the industry standard, and since then, it’s only gotten more common.

Complementary colors are opposite to each other on the color wheel 8-leaf clover. CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Compare any movie from the past five years to a movie from the 80s. Take Jurassic Park. It featured real, saturated colors. Director Steven Spielberg trusted you to see a bright red shirt on a character running from a T. rex and register the danger through the story, not through a draining color filter that does the emotional work for you. Now, every blockbuster frame has been drained. Desaturated digital color grading makes it easier to hide rough edges in computer-generated visual effects. If the CGI doesn’t look perfect, just gray it out and problem solved.

Aside from colors, the stories behind movies have also been affected. Movies typically follow a three-act structure: setup, confrontation, and resolution. This has been the standard for years, but the three-act structure used to only be a guideline, something flexible that let filmmakers tell different kinds of stories. Now, every studio is using it without customizing.

Open with an action sequence, introduce the hero, show their emotional conflict, then another action scene, then the villain introduction. That’s act one. Act two escalates the conflict. Act three has the big CGI battle where something enormous is at stake, but you already know the good guy wins because there’s another sequel planned. DC’s Black Adam is a perfect example of this; it hit every single one of those beats, in order.You can see this in almost every blockbuster made in the past five years. The Star Wars franchise has done it. The DC cinematic universe tried to do it. Nearly every major franchise has tried to do it. The structure has become so rigid that movies feel interchangeable. You could swap out characters between franchises, and it would be hard to notice.

“The Hero’s Journey” is a famous script formula used in many movies. Esbjorn Jorsater, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Studios have become terrified of taking risks. And you can see why. Streaming platforms compress video, making bright colors look messy or unnatural, so muted palettes are safer. Movies need to look good on phones, tablets, and TVs. And gray works everywhere. It works everywhere because it makes no demands on the display; there are no saturated reds that look terrible on a cheap monitor or greens that look wrong on a phone screen.

There’s a kind of movie that doesn’t really exist anymore. The kind that takes its time and lets a scene sit. That trusts you to pay attention without hitting you with another explosion or joke every thirty seconds.

Take Jaws—in particular, the scene where Quint talks about the USS Indianapolis. He describes watching his friends get eaten by sharks. Robert Shaw’s face. The way his voice breaks. The camera stays on him for four minutes, no cuts, no music, just a man telling a story. As written, that sentence might sound boring. In the film, it’s one of the best scenes.

You can’t do that in a modern blockbuster. Someone would make a joke halfway through. The studio would cut it down. People don’t have time for that.

Spielberg made Jaws for general audiences in 1975. It was a summer blockbuster targeted at the widest possible crowd. It made $470 million at the box office on a $9 million budget. It sat with fear and tension without needing constant stimulation, and it became the first modern summer blockbuster in the process.

Now, movie directors are too scared to let you feel anything for more than a few seconds. Every scene has to keep moving and keep the audience engaged. However, slowing down doesn’t mean it has to be boring.

After The Avengers made $1.5 billion in 2012, every studio wanted to replicate that success. So they looked at what Marvel was doing on screen and copied it, the joke-every-thirty-seconds approach, the desaturated color grading, the rigid structure, the CGI-heavy fight scenes, the setup for the next movie instead of a concrete ending. Warner Bros tried it with the DC cinematic universe. Universal tried it with their Dark Universe monster movies. Both failed. They failed because they announced an entire interconnected film slate before most of the movies had been written. The problem was that Marvel’s formula worked partly because it was built slowly, over the years, before it reached The Avengers. Warner Bros tried to skip straight to the team-up movies.

“Avengers: Age of Ultron” (2015) grossed over $1.4 billion worldwide
Credit: Muhammed Seçkin Aktunç, via Deviant Art.

Most of these attempts failed, but that didn’t stop studios from using the same formula everywhere else. Now, even movies that aren’t trying to be Marvel movies look like Marvel movies, with the same washed-out color grading and the same three-act structure with no room to breathe. This worked for Marvel, but Marvel’s approach is infecting everything from romantic comedies to horror films to prestige biopics. 

Between 2020 and 2024, 71 percent of the top-grossing films were part of an established franchise. Only three movies in the top 50 were completely original stories, not based on books or existing IP. Only three out of fifty.

Nowadays, studios don’t want to take chances on original ideas anymore. In 2019, non-franchise films made their lowest total ever. Compare that to the $22.79 billion that franchise films made that same year. Original films made up 58 percent of releases but only brought in 17.5 percent of the money.

So studios keep making sequels and reboots and reusing shared universes. They’re relying on  the same playbook, because that’s how they get the most profit. But when every movie follows the same formula, all those movies start to blur together.

You walk out of the theater and forget what you watched before you even reach home.

There are exceptions. Everything Everywhere All At Once, a 2022 multiverse action-comedy produced by A24, was weird and messy and made over $140 million at the box office. Oppenheimer was a three-hour drama about a physicist and made nearly a billion dollars. These movies proved that audiences will show up for something different when they believe the people behind it have something to say. But these are only the outliers. Most original films don’t even get the chance to succeed.

Meanwhile, studios keep churning out movie franchises using the same old formula. The colors are getting grayer, and the stories are getting more predictable. However, audiences are starting to notice. For example, Marvel’s recent movies have underperformed compared to their earlier films. The Marvels, released in 2023, became the lowest-grossing film in MCU history with just $206 million worldwide, while its predecessor Captain Marvel had made over $1.1 billion. Marvel’s own co-president Louis D’Esposito admitted publicly that “it’s been a rough time” for the studio.

It may take years for Hollywood to fully realize that this formula has stopped working. By then, we would get tons more gray, predictable blockbusters that lack character.

I miss movies that feel like they were made by people with something to say, and not movies following a formula.