Why are movies so dark these days?
polygon.com
polygon.com
Movies have dark scenes nowadays mainly because it is a trend. On top of that dark scenes can have practical advantages (set building, VFX, lighting, etc. can be reduced or become much simpler to do which directly translates into money saved during shooting).
If I had to guess, the trend of dark scenes are a direct result of the fact that in the past two decades we our digital sensors got good enough to actually shoot in such low-light environments.
Before that film crews were typically shooting day-for-night which meant waiting for a set of specific weather conditions and then hoping that grading things blue-ish would sell the thing as being shot in the night.
Another aspect is the much higher brightness and contrast (=dynamic range) of today's displays and projectors. Back in the day you had to literally use the whitest white and the darkest dark available to create a readable picture (and you had to do a ton of lighting to squash the extreme dynamic range of a real world environment into the small dynamic range of your target medium). As this dynamic range became bigger it became possible to not use the whole range and still have good looking results. So in that line of thinking pictures became darker because they can be.
Not that I defend the whole thing, sometimes dark pictures with a high contrast can be good and very readable, sometimes it is used as an excuse to not do the propper work.
In my experience the best movies are made from people with passion. But those cannot be made if these people don't get the money or have to bend over backwards and betray their ideals to do so.
For example in movie adaptations of known franchises changes are made just for change sake so that the writers can show off how smart they are. It would be LESS work to just follow the source material. To be clear: I am NOT talking about changes to better fit a specific medium. I am talking about "look how smart I am, you couldn't predict this twist"-kind of writing that does not improve the story. Still, ego-driven writing seems to be very much accepted?
Same with lighting. No viewer has ever complained about unnatural lighting. This stuff is only made to impress peers.
Why is this kind of behavior so common the industry?
The way of least resistance in an industry controlled by capital is to cave to the interest of the capital.
But the source material might be less marketable and therefore less profitable. So it might be less work, but it would also mean less money, hence the changes.
The top ten highest grossing films are all franchise movies. So that looks like a good indication of hat the public wants to watch. If you look at the rest, there's a decent number of non-franchise films that studios financed but audiences evidently didn't show up for in such large numbers.
If franchise and rehashed-to-death-IP films all had more marketing, wider distribution, and more famous actors/crew, of course they’re going to get a higher viewership.
apparently marketing departments seem to think it’s everyone… so many of the movies, games, etc studios have been pushing over the past few years have been rehashed IP over and over again.
Likewise, I'm not sure that (from the audience's perspective) one can so easily infer simple and exact reasons for why an adaptation differs from the source material.
I'm sure many of the people hired to work on a film, adaptation or otherwise, do want to have an impact on the production, or 'leave a mark'. Deviating from the source material might even be the path of least resistance.
I explicitly write "internet" because that's what can be measured. And those studios probably have a metric for that and writers go full Campbell's Law on it. I write Campbell's, not Goodhart's, because I suspect that it still works just fine, economically.
(I think I know which kind of movies you mean and I don't feel drawn to those at all. Perhaps in part because of all the "clever change" drama that I read about and that I know would be completely lost to me, so maybe it's not that far from Goodhart's after all?)
That's hilarious considering how bad the average writer seems to be these days.
This can improve engagement, fandoms/audiences picking over little details trying to "beat" the next twist. Keeps people talking about your movie/series which helps drive more eyes to it.
Franchise movies are cash grab paint-by-number productions. You can already rule out any kind of passion from anyone involved. Writing changes are made to appeal to international audience not to look smart.
Thing is, the eye adapts to dim light very well. So an old school scene "night" scene may actually better represent what it feels like being there.
While a modern "night" scene might look what a dim area looks like the first 10 seconds before your eyes adapt: dim, gray-ish.
Curve-ball:
what's your take on the dynamic range in over-exposing film vs under-exposing digital?
Depends what you're after and what digital camera you are using (and even which ISO you are using on that specific camera). But more broadly IMO digital has reached dynamic ranges that are "good enough" so you don't have to worry about it in most situations. And if shot correctly digital can look exactly like film.
The major difference for me is the way you work with the material. Actors and everybody else tends to be a tad bit more concentrated when the know how many €/s is running through that camera unless you have an infinite amount of film stock and the funds to develope and digitize them.
But whether that is truly worth the stress of changing a roll of exposed film in the wild during bad weather and praying the material survives is another question.
You should actually overexpose digital (without blowing any highlights) to maximize dynamic range.
Our eyes perceive brightness logarithmically — given something emitting P photons perceived as brightness B, something emitting 2P photons will be perceived as brightness B+1, while something emitting 0.5P photons will be perceived as brightness B-1.
Image sensors are linear and discrete. So going from R,G,B=1,1,1 to 2,2,2 represents a doubling of photons captured, and thus be perceived by the eye as going from B to B+1. But 2,2,2->4,4,4 will go to B+2, 4,4,4->8,8,8 to B+3, etc.
Thus, there is only one bit of dynamic range going from B to B+1, 2 bits of dynamic range from B+1 to B+2, 3 bits from B+2 to B+3, and 2^N bits from B+N-1 to B+N. That’s why you want as much brightness information as possible close to saturating the sensor, since that’s where the most bits of dynamic range are.
This is called “exposing to the right” [0].
[0] https://digital-photography-school.com/exposing-to-the-right...
Since storage is cheap, I’d rather just bracket my shots that need it than expose to the right, reducing the potential of losing a good shot by losing some highlight detail.
And that's if you're watching it in a theater-like setting. If you're in a living room with any lights on, the screen is so dark that little comes through but the reflection of the room. After all these years I still do not understand why glossy screens are so popular.
if its glossy, you can move so the reflection is completely out of the screen
if it's matte, it'll always look a little frosty, right?
reasonable tradeoff either way, but for home theater, i can see why sleek black sells (not to mention how garbage matte would look in a bright store)
What? That's really not how reflective surfaces work. When the screen is dark, I can see the walls, the ceiling or the floor, the bookshelves... moving around does not help, it only changes what's in the reflection.
That aside: Any commonly used digital cinema camera today has 13+ stops of dynamic range without even considering any special HDR modes.
When they shoot dark scenes that leave me wondering who is talking, what they're doing, why they said that, it's a profound failure of the Director to make a minimally funcitonal story.
The other failure is mumbling actors. They whisper when they don't understand what emotion to show. They rush their lines to show passion but instead show lack of fundamental acting skill. They turn from the camera so I can't see their face, say something to the wall, leaving me without necessary facial clues, leaving me to puzzle out their accent or whatnot.
I blame it on falling standards of professionalism, driven by an insatiable demand for content.
This may be so, but shows used to have 22 episodes in the US, now series have 8 or 10. So far, far less work yearly, less cramming to get shooting/processing/writing done.
You'd think this would give more time for better takes, directing, acting.
Guess not.
It stunned me to see ie what actors wore in Game of thrones in later series, when budget was high. A robe which was on screen for 1 minute max, and I focused on face of actress and scene so didn't notice it at all, had such details and beautiful ornaments sewed in by hand, crazy amount of work to create 1 unique piece just for that scene. Multiply by X actors there. Must have cost a small fortune to make, even for such a well oiled machine like Hollywood. Compared to ie Streets of San Francisco, guys wearing the same basic suit outfit over whole series.
You're comparing one of the most expensive series ever, with low cost series.
And even action series, in the old days, would film 60 min. episodes, with live action, explosions, car scenes, really things are very cheap now with CGI.
Imagine having to retake a scene with real explosions?
A bit part of making shows with 22 -24 episode seasons was having a cast of circa nine main characters, so you could film three of them at once.
Audiences generally respond better now there is not network pressure to deliver half a year's worth of new episodes per annum with shows where their favour characters are the main characters every week.
Cinemas have enough speakers and processing to create dozens of virtual speakers.
The result is that the speech is given it's own location and segment of frequencies.
The brain can easily pick it out in this setting. Think hearing your partner speak at a dinner party.
Then people watch movie on a two backwards facing speaker thin TV and think why can't I hear anything!?
It's like watching a 3D movie with no glasses and wondering why it's blurry.
> But then other videos don't have the problem.
They likely would if they were intended for playback on a cinema system and just flattened to mono or stereo.
Christopher Noland doesn't direct/produce movies thinking about how they'll look on a phone on netflix. And the sound engineer he hired doesn't care either.
How much time and money was dedicated to the sound engineering to convert that 20 speaker maybe 100 virtual channel system to your 2 speaker system? Then they need to do it for 2.1, 5.1, Atmos... Whatever else is the new thing these days.
And if you have 5.1 did you consider carefully the layout? Are there multipath effects you haven't dampened? Did you consider the path to each speaker relative to listener?
> Does my sound setup know somehow?
Well yes, kind of. Your TV if it is at all modern will do some processing to the audio. If it's connected to a 5.1 system it might just pass through a 5.1, what does it do with a stereo audio? Or 2.1? What if it gets 7.1 it must decide what to do likely you can control this in the settings.
Let's say you have a 5.1 setup at home. And your TV sends it stereo? What does it do then how does it make 6 channels from 2? The subwoofer is easy, relatively non-direction a low pass filter sends all low end to it and high pass to the regular speakers.
My TV has a decent "clear speech" setting which picks out speech boosts them and then suppresses no speech audio around them. Usually it works perfectly.
Playing stereo audio on a stereo system will work fine.
In the 90s cutting edge cinema.audio was 5.1 systems (cinema digital audio) before that 2.1. You own a 5.1 system you say.
Today cutting edge is systems like Dolby Atmos Cinema which is a 128 virtual, 64 real speaker system.
Are you really saying you can't grasp that cinemas have moved on in audio system since the 80s?
As long as the receiver has identified the positions of your speakers accurately (something receivers have been capable of with a small microphone since the early 00’s) it should place sounds appropriately.
Perhaps suddenly the very quiet speech the sound engineer carefully made space for in location and frequency is suddenly muddied?
Nolan himself has tried to make this argument, he's trying to invoke sub-bass frequencies, that his goal was never for movies to be understandable, and that it was an artistic choice that maybe the audience doesn't have to understand everything.
I'm all for artistic integrity and him being able to do whatever he wants, but I'm also ok with calling Nolan wrong on this one. I have no interest in seeing his films if audio clarity is not one of his goals in film-making. It breaks immersion (real life isn't unintelligible and mumbled), it isn't an enjoyable experience for me, and frankly I think is poor decision making on his part. I'm ok with calling Nolan wrong, hand-wavy artistic stuff aside.
So I looked one up
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/sep/03/tenet-dialogue-...
Interestingly in the case of Tenet the claim is that cinemas intentionally were playing the movie too quiet.
It brings up the usual issues of audio mixing and cinema and home is vastly different. But puts Tenet down to cinemas turning it down to avoid loud explosions.
So is this a case of cinemas turning down well mixed movies because movies are coming out too loud?
But really this is just the same problem over again. Sound engineer mixes audio intending for a high end cinema. Some cinemas plays it poorly, people watching at home have no chance to play it properly...
The sound engineer interviews in that article are interesting though, and they seem to be blaming Nolan and the mixing as well.
I also get wanting to turn them down. I've been in theaters so loud that my ears were ringing after the movie, or were actively hurting during certain scenes. The Dark Knight was one of those. It could also just be poor settings at the local cinema in that case as well though.
Given the vast majority of movies are understandable, I just wish Nolan would mix with that goal in mind given I would actually enjoy his movies most of the time if it just weren't for the muffled speech and sound.
Must I have my own IMAX theater?
Actually, I saw some shitty Nolan movie in the cinema and the audio sucked there as well.
There are entire scenes where, if you watch it in the average person's living room, the only thing you get from the movie are the subtitles (that you set because you can't hear them talking).
There's darkness when it's appropriate. There's light to see what Nolan wants you to see. The fights are both well-choreographed and recorded and cut well -- not the flurry of a thousand ultra-tight cuts that waste the talent of everyone involved.
But the dialogue is about 9 dB under what it should be, and only subtitling makes any of it understandable except for a few scenes. My sound system is well-calibrated and powerful: it's the movie's fault.
Christopher Nolan is to cinematic audio what Chris Gaines is to rock and roll.
People need to be able to see and hear (the audio side is arguable getting even worse) what is happening. That is the absolute baseline for making a good product.
This is the equivalent of making a website where people struggle to read the text and the designer yelling that it is not made to be viewed on cheap mobile phones. Even in our current world of user-hostile web design, most professional designs try very hard to be accessible on a very large range of devices.
And no "naturalism" has nothing to do with it. I don't think unnatural lighting is such an immersion breaker compared the horrible CGI that people are forced to made on crunch time but sure if you want to only use natural lighting, go ahead BUT you still need to make sure the scenes are well lit. There are lots of avant-garde movies with natural lighting that are well lit.
This means that you either have to create for the lowest common dominator or accept that what they get is shit. As you said we would expect to be chewed out if we did that, but for some reason films are different.
To be honest I can see it both ways, as I don't have a soundbar or an oled display, but at the same time why should that hold back those who have paid 4 or 5 times the cost of my setup? If what I have is crap, shouldn't I expect that movies are not looking very good?
You can do some truly amazing things with just audio[0], but it does require a certain dynamic range on the receiver.
As an example: https://darkerprojects.com/lostfrontier/st-lf-season-1-ep-00..., which is a podcast radio play.
Some cases, yes the sound setup helps. Other cases, such as actors "mumbling", sound setup does nothing.
Gibberish is just gibberish.
Of course there are a couple actors that makes it harder: Marlow Brandon or people who speak with a pronounced Southern Accent. But in general I keep hearing this complaint from people who are using the inbuilt speakers.
And you’re right, many people don’t have the things you need to make it sound good. It’s almost like they should have a mastering for bad TVs with crap audio.
Where is the monopoly?
Disney, Netflix, Amazon and so on.
(And yes I am aware that technically they would be an oligopoly. I am purposely using the broader, more practical definition of monopoly that is useful for describing the real world.)
And there is zero or near zero friction in consuming media pretty much all of this media thanks to broadband internet and capable computing devices in everyone’s pocket, other than the price you are able and willing to pay.
I would not classify it as a "monopoly" or an "oligopoly", at least in the sense that anyone is restricting viewers from watching what they want or anyone is restricting media creators from making what they want.
Isn't that their job description? Which filmmaker doesn't fit this? The best art is often made by an 'insane' person.
http://rubenrevecoarte.blogspot.com/2016/02/un-poco-mas-de-r...
EEEEELÉH!... WHERE DID YOU SEE A REVOLVER FIRE SO MANY BULLETS WITHOUT RELOADING IT? A LITTLE MORE REALISM, WOW!
WELL, YES THAT'S WHY IT'S NOT TIME TO BEING SHOOTING OURSELVES IN A SUPPOSED DESTINY FROM ARIZONA, BUT FROM GOING TO DRINK THE MILK
REALISM, I SAID, NOT REALITY
> heeey! where have you seen a revolver fire so many bullets without a reload? a bit more realism, c'mon!
> well, in that case this isn't time to be shooting each other in a supposed "Arizona gorge" either, but to have tea[1] instead
> realism, I said, not reality...
[1] "time to drink milk" to kids means it's time for an afternoon snack
The frame displayed there is obviously too bright, and this is the point.
> It’s a purely stylistic choice, employed for that one moment to cast doubt on Billy’s trustworthiness in the audience’s mind. It’s an extremely stagey choice that fits neatly within the larger series’ heightened, melodramatic style. Scream wouldn’t really be Scream without it.
It doesn't mean that he's ignorant of the aspect that a camera looks differently than our eyes do, as you wrote above. The scene is not bright because of this fact. It's bright for artistic reasons, and you could describe it as overcompensation, since it wouldn't even have to be that bright to deliver a facial expression.
It was so genre savvy and ahead of its time imo.
You can’t make too many movies like Scream though. It has to be the oddity that exists apart from the rest to really shine.
Another one that irks me is shallow depth of field.
I appreciate the deep-focus cinematography by the likes of Kurosawa and Welles all the more when I see modern filmmakers making 80% of their frame blurry on purpose.
Fads are cyclical, so I was hoping that after Zack Snyder brought the style to its logical unwatchable conclusion with his “Army of the Bokeh”, cinematographers and directors would move on, but I guess it’s not that time yet.
This is even more annoying in YouTube videos. People are so obsessed with shallow depth of field that even in product reviews they focus on the face and leave the product blurry.
I can't find it right now, but there's a video by Tony Northrup where he's reviewing a camera and he's so obsessed with filming himself at f1.4 that his face is barely in focus half the time because of the failed focus tracking.
Personally I don't agree with the take of the article in two ways. The first one is that it gives way too much default credit to realism as a stylistic choice. Movies are works of fiction and the creator has total artistic freedom in what aesthetic to go for, and being 'realistic' isn't necessarily a good thing, you still need to make the case for it.
Secondly I think the bigger reason is a trend towards grittiness, bleakness or a sort of 'scandi-noir crime drama' look. People go for that mood not just visually but also in terms of writing, muted mumbly dialogue, minimalism, and so on.
Villeneuve's Dune that's mentioned in the article is to me, despite the apparent popular appeal, a negative example of this trend. The movie is overly bleak and oppressive, cold, distant in a way that many of his films are and heavy on visual stereotypes. (the hairless, pale, black-dressed 'brutish' Harkonnen's, a caricature that the books deliberately avoided).
These days for some reason studios forego that process and "meh, good enough, stream it".
From an enthusiastic GoT fan back then: I don't really know where the author got that "episode after episode" from. I remember exactly one episode, where overdark scenes were an issue, S8E3 "The Long Night" - and in the episode, darkness was a plot device and a deliberate stylistic choice.
There was an unfortunate scene in which the characters were unable to make out whether the enemy was approaching or not, due to intense darkness. The filmmakers chose to visualise this by making the scene almost pitch black, with literally not enough information in the pixels to see the characters. I'm sure that must have looked impressive in a test screening in a cinema, but when streamed, it caused lots of viewers to be distracted by their own reflections and turn up their TVs to maximum brightness - because the scene sort of looked as if you should be able to see something, even though really you weren't.
I think that was a visual experiment by the filmmakers which, frankly, failed - but it was at least a deliberate choice and not blindly following some trend.
I thought it played nicely with the use of light to stylise the rest of the world - Westeros with its bright but slightly murky look, like a busy city in Central Europe, Winterfell, The Wall, and the north with its flat grey shadowless light from an overcast sky, and the searing oranges and yellows of the desert-y parts of Essos that looked and felt hot to look at.
One example is the recently released adaptation of Great Expectations[1]. It's not just the overall darkness, but general lack of colour which is striking to me. I think this is just an artistic style and the next stage of colour grading from the Teal & Orange[2] trends of a few years ago.
You get used to it when watching a programme and forget what full colour actually looks like. Watching old films, something like the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia[3] highlighted it for me, really shows how much colour has been drained from modern film & TV productions.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2023/great-expectations-ai...
[2] https://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-h...
[3] I think the recent remasters release may have some colour grading in too though, just looking at some scenes they are darker!
Did you tried to see anything at night in a winter forest? It is impossible. Maybe full Moon can help to see something, I don't know really, but my experience tells that the only thing you can see without an artificial light is darkness and (if you are lucky) a few stars blinking through branches of trees (which are invisible by themselves because they are totally black over a black background).
I always laughed at a scene where Harry Potter follows silver doe to a river and Ron Weasley finds him without a notice (Harry didn't see any lights coming), and Severus Snape secretly watches them. Ok, I can write off Snape, he is probably using some magic to see in the dark, he is a very powerful wizard after all. But all the seven books say not a word about Harry Potter or even Hermione Granger knowing something like that. When they face darkness they use Lumos that works like a flashlight. And a film shows completely unrealistic forest where you can see the scene. Trees, for example. Screen doesn't turn into a black rectangle, but to be realistic it should.
You are right that if we walk on a moonless night it is near impossible to see anything, but on a full moon night the entire world is lit in ethereal silver. I won't say it is as lit as during the day, but I would have zero issue navigating at all.
It also takes only one look to understand why werewolves, silver and the moon are connected in folktales.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogme_95
See rule 2.
Dialog being mumbly and video being dark doesn't follow from actual realism, it's a stylistic choice.
It's frustrating to watch and I empathize with people who feel like their cherished shows of before are being "ruined" by spin-offs or reboots.
As far as people who say their shows are being ruined, the studios are still chasing younger audiences and mainstream popularity. A starfleet academy show was announced the other day for example, so teenage drama here we come.
How so, we are already used with Federation ships having a lot of lighting, so now with the new cool style they also need to somehow explain why they decided that Star Fleet prefers to walk in semi-darkness on the bridge, corridors and working spaces. I can maybe understand the Game of Thrones or Mandalorian caves need to be dark for realism excuse but for Star Trek is obvious a stylistic choice to use the cool new styles and shit on the bright optimisitc one from the past.
I wonder how many people pull up brightness on their TVs only for that reason and ruin the experience for all that actually bright content just because they have to see something in that darkness.
Given how ridiculously dark House of the Dragon was in some episodes, with the entire season only set in candlelight, I don't think they've learned anything.
Couple that with some video streamers (looking at you, Netflix) always defaulting to a different audio track, while it is often in its original film’s language, the audio gets bastardized with commentary overlay and overlaps thereby ruining the original movie experience. Often cannot default to “original movie sound”.
Oh, did I mention that the closed captioning has started ignoring the hard-of-hearing and deaf folks? They only transcribe the foreign language into open-captions. I mean, WTF? We folks kinda want ALL languages captioned.
Just the three kinds of darkness we are descending into … nowadays.
Do you mean that when there’s foreign langage being spoken the CC track just sits unused and only the on-screen translation for hearing audiences remain?
I assume that plays havoc on accessibility equipment? And from what I remember open captions are often styled to not clash with the picture, so they’re sometimes had to read too.
In turning the closed-captioning ON to English, it is the loss of English (in non-English language movie) captioning when a foreign actor sporadically speaks in English. "Normal" English viewer would enjoy just the same; deaf and hard-of-hearing, not so much.
I get it. It's style, but it's the opposite or realistic, or motivated lighting - one would imagine a workplace would be lit properly, use light walls to reflect more direct light and provide diffuse lighting.
The proliferation of sequels trading on nostalgia, cinematic universes like Marvel etc., may seem like counter-examples but I’d argue they represent a directing team whose specific vision is making a lot of profit. Profit is an internal motive and the directing team’s wide latitude lets them pursue it, rather than profit being an external concern that steps in scene by scene and tells them to add more lights. (Also note that Marvel’s MCU is well-known for the very particular creative vision driving the entire franchise.)
When the decision-makers have a unique vision, we get cult classics, new schools like “lighting realism”, and also awful movies like The Room. When the decision-makers are influenced by trends, we get waves of shaky cam or dark lighting.
As a 10 year old, trying to watch a dark movie where the main characters whisper or speak in a low volume was basically impossible. I don’t know why, maybe my senses just weren’t that developed yet, but I struggled so much. I remember watching Harry Potter, and in that scene where Harry stands in front of the mirror with Dumbledore, I could barely see or understand anything, despite watching this in the cinema.
As I got older, I was able to perceive darker scenes and listen to whispered or hushed speech better. But it made movie watching way less enjoyable when I was younger. There were large chunks of movies where I basically just zoned out because they were too dark and or quiet. I’m curious if anyone else experienced something similar.
The artists aren't respecting or grading with consumer equipment in mind. I'm not getting an optimal viewing experience or even getting the artist's creative intent by trying to recreate the intended viewing settings. Dolby Vision still isn't completely supported when playing back a file on desktop. Certain DV profiles can be passed through to TVs that support it, but that's not possible for Blu-Ray Dolby Vision files. Neither the Xbox nor PS5 support Dolby Vision disk playback. Many playback solutions for playback of Dolby Vision from PC throw away the dynamic data defeating the point of caring about DV over HDR10. This is also ignoring how streaming changes colors can change due to compression, and some shows and movies are only available via streaming.
My TV can detect ambient light, Dolby Vision IQ already exists, but in my experience fails too often. Some would argue DV IQ also moves away from filmmarker's intent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D83SXcguwBU
https://twitter.com/HBOMaxHelp/status/1576793465010135040
https://www.trustedreviews.com/explainer/what-is-dolby-visio...
"The same place as the music"
https://twitter.com/siracusa/status/1122834984228806656?t=_H...
I think this style looks great in photography but it’s distracting when trying to watch a movie. I hope they find a new aesthetic.
The article just rules this out without any citations. CGI is outsourced to lowest bidder and it looks as it looks.
The Batman scene shown in article reeks of cheap CGI, probably on a green screen.
(It's magnified in a living room that I can't truly darken during the day).
OLED has such dark blacks that what used to be dim is now no-light-at-all-black.
HDR also seems to affect things, but I'm not certain if and how much it contributes to the problem (or is a solution).
First, some context: the problem of dark scenes is the same problem as unintelligible dialog is the same problem as a lot of classical music being quieter than pop music.
All of these creators are striving for greater range. Dark scenes work fantastically if you watch them on a bright screen in a pitch-black room. Dialog is perfectly intelligible in surround sound at full volume, and marvelously expressive. And classical music is delicately soft and then powerfully loud in an otherwise perfectly quiet room, to incredible effect.
But as soon as you're watching on a screen in a normally lit room, or listening on your TV speakers while people are talking in the kitchen, or trying to listen to classical in your car with the sounds of traffic... it all falls apart.
The solution is what audio engineers have known about for decades, which is called compression. Compression is: make the quiet parts of the classical music almost as loud as the loud parts. Boost the dialog channel so the mumbling parts are almost as loud as regular conversation. And boost the brightness of dark scenes. Compress the range -- go back to less range.
But we don't want to mess with the source material when viewing/listening in ideal conditions, because we want to keep that awesomeness. So we need dynamic compression. Which isn't really that hard.
A television can have an ambient light sensor just like your MacBook does, to boost dark scenes when you watch during the day, but not at light with the lights off.
A television can have a cheap microphone to detect ambient noise, and also be aware of its own volume setting, and so boost dialog at low volume settings and when it's noisy around, using the surround sound signal. (And a MacBook or iPad or iPhone can do this too.)
And your car radio or phone music player can apply dynamic audio compression to your classical music as well, similarly using a microphone to detect the need to compensate for the rumble of traffic or conversation in the coffee shop.
What baffles me is that all of this is possible right now, and it's actually trivial to implement, relatively speaking. (There's a bunch of tuning involved to make it work well and feel perceptually natural, but it's not like we need to invent new types of signal processing or anything.)
But nobody's even talking about dynamic compression as the solution. And I just don't get it. Why not?
My AVR has "loudness management" which compresses the audio. It just doesn't work transparently so I find it irritating because it's obvious when it's changing the volume. My partner does prefer it though, but I'm more of a purist.
So the answer to your question seems to be that it doesn't work well as a solution.
Yes, yes it is. Black Panther's CGI was notoriously awful even by 1990's standards.
So it's cheaper and faster and movie making is a business.
Instead, CGI became a lazy way out for quick and sloppy production quality, even in established franchises from studios with deep pockets. In the first IronMan and SpiderMan movies, the heroes actually wore physical suits painstakingly made by artisans in the business. In the last Marvel movies the costumes are just lazy CGI that look like textures over a spandex suit instead of acting like physical items over a human body. Terminator 1 & 2 had practical models and they still look great.
"Oh, we don't need to finalize the real costumes and models now, just dress the actors in gray spandex with tringles, put them behind a green screen and we'll CGI everything later on before release". "It's OK, we don't need to bother having correct lighting and shadows in the studio, the CGI monkeys will just fix it in post with their computer thingies."
CGI now somehow looks worse than VFX 10-30 years ago despite the insanely better tech, everything just feels rushed with no creative direction behind it.
The Hobbit is much newer but doesn't look so great in comparison. Sure it has some amazing special effects but the cinematic footage doesn't compare as well next to the older films
But Hobbit trilogy - all the time I had feeling I'm watching it from behind some plastic screen, or perhaps an action game. It's not bad (tho the book was "spread" into 3 movies) but excessive use of CGI and post-processing is clearly visible. Hell, the An Unexpected Journey has moments where Gandalf's face is unnaturally lighten up with dodge tool - and that does give me the unpleasant feelings.
I still believe that computers in movie industry should be tools to enhance camera work, not fully replacing it. You can deliver an exciting story portrayed without overfilling it with CGI or... lens flares, bokeh effects in every scene.
1/2/3 is the worse examples as the CGI quality was particularly bad. Let's not even start about Jar Jar.
It's surprising how it makes it more immersive than perfection.
Things like the new Marvel movies leave me a bit cold because there's no sense of "how did they do that", because the answer is always going to be "green screen and Blender".
Interesting comment, because while watching Avatar Way of Water, I was constantly asking to myself "how did they do that?" Technically, the answer is of course "green screen and computers", but that's about as useful as watching a great performance in acting or sports, and saying "it's just technique and practice". No, it's that but while trying to make new things that you haven't seen before, paying attention to every detail - and in the case of Avatar, also doing that for 3 hours straight.
I think the modern Marvel movies leave me cold because of the same issues that the story for Avatar left me cold: it's all easy and digestible, executed with perfect competence but little ability or desire for surprise, subtlety or discomfort.
If you are however claiming that, on average, visual fidelity has declined in comparable product tiers, well, no. In the past a lot of folks would just not do much FX at all, because it was prohibitively expensive.
It's somewhat incorrect. We now have significantly more CGI, and most of it significantly better. See, e.g., Why C.G. Sucks (Except It Doesn't) https://youtu.be/bL6hp8BKB24
However, the over-reliance on CGI is a problem
"Toupees always look so fake. I can spot them instantly. I can't imagine why anyone wears them."
Maybe that example is less pointed now that baldness seems more socially acceptable, but the point stands: Of course you see bad CGI, in that you notice that the CGI you're intended to notice is sometimes flawed. You don't see CGI the moviemaker doesn't want you to see, CGI used to clean up shots, CGI used to replace what would have been matte shots decades ago, and whatever else CGI is used for these days. You see a scene and it registers as a scene, not a shot with some obvious CGI composited in.
Recursing, some matte shots were horrible and obvious, whereas others, like Dana Barret's apartment building in Ghostbusters, were pretty seamless.
Too many movie makers these days assume that any issues can be removed by CGI in post-production. But you can only do so much with the material you're given.
Oh, and post-production time and budget are often an afterthought, too.