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Comment by DeepYogurt | Hacker News Reader

As I recall the green tint was added to the second DVD release. The theatrical release had a more balanced color palette.

Edit: Seems that the UHD release removed the green tint as well

https://www.avforums.com/reviews/the-matrix-4k-blu-ray-revie...

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Also from paragraph 2 of the article:

> The initial DVD release had a neutral-warm color palette while the 2008 Blu-ray added a heavy green cast to match the sequels. The Matrix's 2018 UHD Blu-ray release apparently hews closer to how the film looked in theaters with a more purple-blue tint

Paragraph 9

> Now The Matrix has been an odd fish in terms of releases on home formats, with a reasonably natural tone to its original almost flagship DVD release back in 1999 (it was one of the first titles that many DVD adopters bought), but - years later - a very different look to its 2004 re-release on DVD. Everything in 'The Matrix' suddenly became really green. This green-tinged 'style' carried on to its Blu-ray release in 2008, where things were dialled back a little, but some sequences were still almost monochromatic in their green bent.

Updated my comment to reference a second dvd release.

> it was one of the first titles that many DVD adopters bought

I remember it being bundled (in the same box) with my first DVD player.

Perhaps "the most DVD movie" [1], second only to "Fight Club" in people's opinions.

[1] https://twitter.com/freemaneric/status/1473337573326180364

That’s odd, I had the first DVD release and I absolutely remember the green tint to all the scenes happening “inside the matrix”. In fact, I want to say they explicitly reference this in the commentary at some point.

Yes, I think the second release just amped that effect up and added it to more scenes.

I believe it definitely had some green tint / elements to it. Just not quite the "green wash" it got later on.

Same.

For the unfamiliar, I can understand ... but as a fan, I can't believe this fact is even in question.

I don't necessarily trust my memory from 20 years ago, but I do recall both the initial VHS release and the DVD version I got a couple years later both having the green tint. It's one of the things that floored me as an impressionable teenager.

Maybe they went heavy on the green for subsequent releases, but according to "The Matrix Revisited", the green tone was an integral part of the filmmaking process (for those interested, it's around the 20min10sec mark).

The green tint was definitely there in the initial DVD release and, presumably, 35mm cinema release. For the sequels they made the tint way more obvious and then regraded the original to match. But the tint was always there.

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