Cinematographers, colorists, and camera operators explain how shifting technologies and business expectations are blurring modern cinema's images together.
“We used to light movies” has become a common refrain among filmgoers who watch both modern cinema and titles from decades past. On streaming, there’s a waxy sheen to the image, where James Corden, Meryl Streep, and Nicole Kidman in The Prom have an uncanny and unnaturally soft smoothness, where light hovers around their faces as if caught by a mesh net. In nearly two decades’ worth of Marvel and DC superhero movies, lugubrious action scenes—from The Avengers to Spider-Man: Brand New Day—are filmed in an even, inoffensive, medium-pressure light so that everything is visible, with few shadows to speak of, and even the glints of light supposed to imitate lens flare are slightly dulled down from the original luminosity. Even audience members that don’t typically pay much attention to visual details have begun complaining about Wicked‘s washed-out cinematography and the omnipresent “Netflix look.” So why do movies look like that?
In these aforementioned examples and more, subjects, their settings, and their backgrounds are not defined apart or in relation to one another. This low-contrast approach is a modern take on “naturalistic” lighting, where all light sources appear to exist in-universe and mimic what illumination would look like without the need for any additional “artificial” lights. It’s lamps, overhead fluorescents, outside weather, and phone screens versus hard key lights and stylistic fills. Generally soft, gentle, and utilitarian, this approach comes at the expense of texture, tactility, and definition.
Crucial changes have occurred in the last few decades of filmmaking, beyond the digital technology that’s used to create these shots—primarily, their distribution and the mode in which they are consumed. From social-first clip-farming, to chopped-up fancams of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, to ripped-for-YouTube excerpts, movies are being watched (in whole or in part) on phones, laptops, the backs of airplane seats, TVs with HDR, tablets, and cheap home projectors. While movies are shot on a variety of formats, from 35mm to the Arri Alexa, the symbiosis between the tools that make the images and those that view them has been upset.
That sometimes difficult to describe “look” movies from other eras have, usually shot on film, has much to do with celluloid’s tangibility. Even as it captures something as ephemeral as light, film in a literal object with material properties that a digital sensor turns into electronic information. On one frame of unexposed film, depending on the stock and manufacturer, there are at least three layers beyond the film base and the layer that absorbs UV rays. In color film, the emulsion layers that correspond to color couplers (cyan and red, magenta and green, and yellow and blue) are subtractive, and create a negative image; when placed atop one another, they create a full color image. Film contains silver halide crystals, which absorb the light photons. Light passing through layers of physical material, and the chemical reaction that occurs during the exposure and development period, is what gives film its texture, its ability to create dense and inky shadows or shimmery highlights.
Digital filmmaking cements ephemerality into the filmmaking process, sensors approximating without replicating that photochemical procedure. Light that was once captured by crystals on film is turned to ones and zeroes by a sensor. The sensors detect and read the light information, going through a process of photoelectric conversion, charge accumulation, signal transfer and conversion into voltage, and finally conversion to a digital value.
But digital and analog are merely tools with their own advantages and disadvantages—what distinguishes them is materiality and flexibility. As colorist Jared Rosenthal tells The A.V. Club, “Film is higher contrast. It does things that the characteristics of [physical] film naturally has, which have shaped aesthetics, or what a movie looks like, for decades…what a ‘movie’ looks like to people, it looks like what film looks like.” Different stocks and film types changed that aesthetic over time, with regional trends and processes also helping to dictate these aesthetics. But the inherent textural qualities of photochemical film—its grain, the tiny crystals that literally shimmer and shine when light passes through them—created a standard that was disrupted by digital.
While color, space, and depth of field were concerns for cinematographers during the early digital revolution, dynamic range—the spectrum between light and dark, white and black—was top of mind for cinematographers like Geoff Boyle and Jost Vacano when they were interviewed for the 2013 documentary Side By Side. Though the technology had been introduced to consumer televisions in the late 2010s, either as Dolby Vision or HDR10, this advancement in home image quality became standardized by the 2020s. This meant that scenes could now be lit with a hair of light, the assumption being that audiences at home watching Game Of Thrones would be able to see what the cinematographers had seen on set. Of course, it hasn’t really worked out that way.
Rosenthal mentions House Of Cards as helping develop a new look—antiseptic, shadows curved towards gray, borderline monochromatic—”[Netflix] was like, ‘Okay, this is gonna set the standard.'” But few craftspeople are like David Fincher and his DP Igor Martinovic, able to paint with subtlety and precision using a limited color palette. Fincher and Martinovic created a cool, steely aesthetic that appeared not that difficult to achieve in its limited, carefully controlled, icily neutral colors. They paired a sense of depth with an ability to make the political world at once claustrophobic and representative of a late-2010s luxury minimalism, one that anticipated a flow of wealth towards the already wealthy. House Of Cards looks the way it does because it’s a political thriller about the soulless siphoning power away from the people. But not all movies or shows are about that, nor do they take the time to refine their visual identity, which meant those that followed the series learned the wrong lessons: Use modest “realistic” lighting, make it easily shareable on a variety of platforms, and pump it out.
While these images may be composed with little light but a bit of artistic intention, they’re still subject to the file compression that platforms use in order for videos to be streamed at the drop of a dime. Even 4K video is shrunk in order to be streamed at home. It doesn’t matter if there’s a beautifully composed night shot of Aemond Targaryen in House Of The Dragon if the pipeline between the scene being lit—faintly, relying on fast and ultra responsive digital sensors—and refined in post—emphasizing darkness and the HDR technology—if the file that contains that scene is ultimately going to be crushed, rendering that picture information less legible, detailed, and complex. What comes out is visual mush.
This confluence of consumer trends and changes in production workflow has effectively resulted in frames that strive less for innovation or beauty and more for a quick fix. The quickness and disposability here has infiltrated the set. This means that, outside direct-to-streaming films and the glut of plasticky Marvel and grim DC movies—and exceptions to the rule, like star DPs Roger Deakins, Autumn Durald Arkapaw, and Robbie Ryan—the late 2010s and 2020s have seen the screen get grayer. Regardless of the quality of the movies, their visual identity is constricted by a notable lack of oomph, an absence of substantiality in their colors, highlights, and blackpoints.
The industry, from the best to the worst to the mediocre middle, has gravitated towards a look that takes the wrong lessons from House Of Cards‘ darkness and its low-contrast monotone. Cinematographer Steve Yedlin tells The A.V. Club that “It’s a business, and a lot more stuff gets created than is necessarily the pinnacle of the craft. There is a factory belt.” Felipe Vara de Rey describes the contemporary look as “desaturated, low contrast, a little dull,” Rikki Porter says she’s seen “a more flattened look across the board,” Tara Violet Niami says that movies lately have a “super low-contrast, desaturated look that’s lit softly but [with] directionless lighting,” and camera operator Joe Brady says he had been seeing images where “the contrast ratios are very slim [and] there’s no detail in the shadows or in a really overexposed highlight.”
What these technicians describe is partially the product of what’s happening on set, but is more emblematic of the temperature of the film industry. As de Ray explains, there’s simply less time. “We have to shoot movies that we used to shoot in 42 days, [now] we have to shoot them in 28, so we sacrifice polishing the look,” he says. “We sacrifice budget on lights and electrical crews, because with the modern sensors, the dynamic range, the sensitivity, we can shoot something and fine-tune it and polish it in post.” Streaming platforms have reshaped production schedules not only for their own content, but for their industry competitors. “People just have less patience for spending more money on lenses and lights,” Porter says of her experience with streamlined schedules. “People, at the point where we get to post, they don’t care anymore. They’re like, ‘We just want this movie done, right?'”
Cinematographer and director Jake Moore says that, to increase efficiency, more cameras are being added to shoots: “When you have two, three cameras, that changes the lighting plot, because Camera A can’t catch Camera B’s light, etc.” This results in lighting setups designed to be primarily unobtrusive: top lights that hang from the ceiling or are placed high up and emit little more than a soft and even glow, or single light sources that are faster to strike. “I’ve been on set with some high-level talent who do not want contrast ratios on their face,” Brady says. “I was on a set with [model] Iman a while ago, and she literally yelled at the DP because she was moodily lit and she wanted a ring light.”
This desire for efficiency collides with an assumption that all could be fixed in the post production process. “It’s awesome that you have all of these knobs and buttons that can do everything you like,” Yedlin says, “but not if you need to use all of them in order to just get to a baseline before you can even finesse it.” An unprecedented level of freedom in crafting an image is countered by producers breathing down cinematographers’ necks while also siloing them from important collaborators, like their colorists. As much as cinematographers like Porter or camera ops like Brady or colorists like Rosenthal may want to create more dynamic images, they are ultimately beholden to the client. “You’re not working in a vacuum,” Rosenthal says, “These decisions are [being] made by committee.”
Moore, who works frequently in the advertising and music video space, refers to creative directors who bring in lookbooks featuring shots by Wong Kar-Wai and David Fincher, and then, when the time comes to do the shot, recoil from those more stylish ideas—blown-out highlights, velvety colors, inky blacks, tactile contrast, visible noise and grain—instead pushing his team to pivot towards something flatter, more even, duller, and easier to rework later. In his experience, rather than create dynamic shots on set and refine them in post, there is an expectation to capture the blueprint on set and ultimately create the image in post-production.
That’s rarely a possibility. “I know colleagues who do great work, but a lot of times it’s not set up in prep,” Yedlin says. “So then [there’s] this Herculean effort in post to get it to work, because they don’t have that setup.” As Brady quips, “If you didn’t do anything particularly interesting on set, you’re not gonna be able to make it look that good later.”
There are, of course, recent counterexamples—Maddie’s Secret, Disclosure Day, I Love Boosters—where masters and ascendant filmmakers alike find lushness, vibrancy, and buoyancy in their cinematography. Yet, two of the highest-grossing films of 2026—Obsession and Backrooms—are bellwethers of a materializing YouTube generation who shot their first films on shoestring budgets. Now their more accomplished movies still suffer from murky, listless shots. Much as darkness is a crucial component to both films, their shadows look less like a dark abyss enveloping the viewer and more like sludge.
One additional factor behind this may be these filmmakers’ experience making images that can be watched any way and anywhere with no distinction. The images themselves, once essentially intended for a single place, the movie theater, are diffused across a visual landscape in which everything that bookends them—memes, comedy sketches, “get ready with me” videos, AI slop, and (most frequently) advertisements—is flattened and blended together.
One can describe images of the last five or so years in simple terms: gentle, consumable, shareable. But when we look back at the Hollywood movies released in the 2020s, at their glut of bizarrely unremarkable images, what will film history classes say about them? What will students say about movies with “streaming sheen”, murky shadows, and blunted highlights; about faces smoothed out by diffuse lighting; about shots with directionless lighting that deny an image a sense of space or scope? Will they mourn when homogeneity invaded the movies?
If so, they’ll really be mourning artists having less time, fewer resources, and more demands from risk-averse committees, all of which stems from a consolidation of Hollywood as a whole. The WB/Paramount merger is on the precipice of approval, meaning the superconglomerate could slash through thousands of layoffs; Disney laid off one thousand people in April, converting many longtime craftspeople to contract workers on project basis. Meanwhile, the microdrama, an import from China, offers competition on an even faster production timeline. Yet, this matrix of issues is symptomatic of a broader problem: The audience and the work are becoming disconnected from one another; movies are so unmoored from a place and time that those at the top see little reason beyond tentpoles to assert their material value.
The resurgence of moviegoing may suggest a renewed connection between film, audience, and the big screen, but the long and short of this persistent problem is that it takes time, labor, and care to craft a beautiful image. Making sure the lights are at the right angle, that they’re set at the right levels, that the camera is in harmony with that arrangement—it requires collaboration, communication, and a willingness to experiment. It requires people investing in the present moment, not deciding to fix everything in post. Even if the industry has normalized (and incentivized) a certain look, that won’t shape the work of every artist, now or in the future. “I think there will be something fresh and different coming, particularly with the young generations,” says Tara Violet Niami, who teaches at Chapman University. “They’re experimenting. I have some hope.” Along with proper lighting, hope isn’t a bad way to illuminate the path forward.
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