Hollywood’s Fading Colors

There’s going to be a lot of images and videos on this one. Just be prepared.

In 1939, The Wizard Of Oz did everything it could to show off a new film coloring technique called Technicolor. That was two years after Walt Disney Pictures created all new colored paints to embrace the process, which actually dates back to at least 1916 according to a quick search, possibly a couple of years older. It helped make colors on screen look bright and vibrant.

Look around you. Does color still exist? I’m betting it does unless you have some particular decorating tastes or somehow reading this in a closet or something. However, you wouldn’t know it by watching a lot of TV shows and movies, or playing certain video games. Don’t get me wrong; I know you could point to examples that counteract this commentary, but overall, in the genres I’m mostly interested in, it seems that bright colors are dying off. Action, sci-fi, fantasy, and even some dramas seem have the  color saturation turned down low, even properties that used to be bright and colorful. Frankly, it’s a disappointing trend. There are times where this may make sense for a certain visual style, to boost the story, but maybe the problem is too many of this kind of story. At this point I’m trying to pad out for the homepage, but you’ve seen video games that seemed so lacking in color they might as well be black and white. It’s just a sea of browns and greys. Brighter colors are a thing of the past while even darker colors don’t have the vibrancy it used to. And what’s happened to the sun lately?

I just feel the need to vent on that. Oh look, this is good for the homepage, so let’s get into it.

I can demonstrate a lot of what I’m talking about with the trailer to Red One, which by the way I totally want to see so don’t accuse me of trashing this movie.

It’s a modern action flick, or a parody of one maybe. Whatever it is, thing looks fun as heck. On the other hand, those are some dark colors for Santa Claus. I’m actually surprised the island scene has sunlight, given how seldom that happens. How many action and superhero movies have you seen where there is no sunlight. Even sci-fi can’t seem to put a decent lighting system in their space stations and starships. Video games have so many dark corridors with dark colors that sometimes you can’t tell the characters from the background, though they are the most likely to buck this trend. It’s mostly the M-rated action games.

I mean, this is Santa Claus.

Bright colors are sort of a big part. This is because action movies are trying to look more “realistic” than, say, the 1980s. Compare an older James Bond movie to anything from maybe late Timothy Dalton through Daniel Craig. Sunlight is an afterthought, and any brighter colors seem to have disappeared with the cool gadgets disguised as other things. I’ve literally heard about petroleum jelly being smeared on the camera lens, but these days they just turn down the saturation in post.

I’m not asking for bright colors alone. I’ve seen Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy movie, and while I praise them for actually disfiguring the crooks like the comic, maybe trying to get those colors in was a bad idea. The black and white movies didn’t try that hard, but at least they had an excuse to not have bright colors. They didn’t have color at all. Compare the previous trailer with this live-action Santa Claus from 1985, which isn’t an action movie, but I still think it’s a good comparison.

One of my childhood favorites, by the way. Now look at an action movie from that period.

Action movies today, however, look more like this.

More action movies look like the John Wick franchise than any Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. You need to set something on fire in that trailer to get colors and light.

Now I do get it. On the technical side darker lighting does help with hiding special effects. That explains the CG-heavy sci-fi movies using it. It also means they don’t have to fight the sunlight in outdoor shoots if they have an “excuse” to have the sky overcast the whole time or replicating it for indoor shoots. A lot of the time, however, it’s the atmosphere they’re trying to create. That’s both understandable and part of the problem.

It just adds to the hopelessness of the situation. It’s a dark, depressing world and at best the protagonists might survive or break even. There’s victory, no hope, no proof of the goodness of man. That recent Thunderbolts* trailer (the asterisk is in the title) has a line that there are bad people and worse people, but they clearly don’t believe in good people. After a hard day of work, some life tragedy (as I write this two separate hurricanes have smacked the daylights out of the southern region of the United States), or just needing a boost to your day, it gets harder to find anything recent to give you a sense of catharsis, that life could get better. “At least you aren’t these @#$%#$%@” just isn’t enough. Even the horror movies are brighter than the superhero movies of today, and those are supposed to be a hopeless situation to set up the mood.

Am I wrong? I want to be wrong, but every trailer I see, every movie and video game clip I come across in certain genres just seem dark, colorless, and only has sunlight to be dramatic (which is temporary) or on a tropical island…and even most of those are in kids movies. Remember, it’s not the existence of A (movies with darker colors and barely any light) but the absence of B (bright, sharp, or at least not muted colors and not making me feel like I need to point a flashlight at the screen to see anything) that’s the issue. Would it hurt to keep the saturation at natural colors, if not slightly brighter? You want to know what’s really hurting Hollywood? Activist writing, poor adaptations, and creators who tell moviegoers it wasn’t made for them and are surprised when they stay away…but also the hopelessness of so many modern movies. I just can’t live in those worlds. I get more sunlight through the windows of my attic HQ than I do today’s action and sci-fi movies. They’re not fun to watch, so I go back to the movies that do, from older stories to kids stories. I like color and I like the sun. Hollywood today doesn’t, and they think that makes them more adult. It just makes them boring and depressing. That’s not what I go to fiction for.