Movies just don’t hit like they used to, and people are blaming their colourisation. After the trailer for the Wicked (2024) movie dropped earlier this year, social media went spiralling with fans of the original Wizard of Oz (1939) asking: where’s all the colour?
There’s a reason that we’ve gone from being immersed in worlds shot in vibrant shades of colour to watching movies tinged with what's been dubbed a “intangible sludge.” As one TikTok user said, “this isn’t just a matter of using technicolour; you can get great looks in digital,” so why does every film look like the life’s been sucked out of it lately?
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We don’t use the same film
Film stock is a major cause for this. As one user on Reddit commented at the start of this year, movies like Jaws, The Godfather, Cabaret, ChinaTown, and Taxi Driver were shot on 5254, before Kodak replaced it with the Series 600 5247. This era produced movies like Back To The Future, Alien, BladeRunner, Star Wars, etc. After that came 5257, which was used in the ‘90s. Basically, each of these decades of cinema were largely defined by the film stock and processing methods used at the time. Nowadays, even when movies and TV shows are shot on film, they come out looking like they were shot digitally because of the technology we use, called Vision 3. Basically, as much as the 5254 was defined by bold colours and high contrast, Vision 3 is defined by low contrasts and bright hues.
Digital colour grading
Some people blame the digitisation of colour grading for the desaturation of movies in recent years. What people call the “intangible sludge” - the murky, unsaturated colour palettes of recent cinema - is in part because we stopped colour correcting physically, and swapped to digital. Back in the day, we used to use chemicals to colour correct film, applying chemicals to film negatives in the lab which in turn could be used to create colour shifts, tinting scenes different hues. But after the 1990s, when we started digitally scanning film negatives, that kind of stopped.
It’s just the trend right now
Whilst there’s no doubt that film types and post production techniques have altered the way the industry approaches colouring their movies, there’s also a strong argument that dark, unsaturated colour schemes are just in right now. As another user in a Reddit thread discussing why movies look like they do now said, “It's just fashion. Remember a few years ago when it seemed that every other film was teal and orange?”
Just like there are trends in fashion, there are trends in movies and the way that they look. They went on to explain, “Currently [the trend is] soft light and saturation turned all the way down. [But] I have a feeling we'll see a return to vibrant colours and bold lighting the more people want to stand out from the current trend.”
Although another user argued, “The sky was blue in Everything Everywhere All At Once. The grass popped in Barbie. Film is art, color is emotion. Technology is advancing; the filmmakers of yesterday probably wished they had the color spaces of today.” Basically, Wicked doesn’t have to be colourised like The Wizard of Oz. Modern directors are entitled to their own artistic liberties.
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