The Abyss Gazes

Spoiler: Its almost always an artistic choice. However, In some rare cases, its to make up for shit cameras: I'm looking at you RED/Hobbit trilogy. But nowadays its a choice to give the film a certain feel.

There was a while when all action movies were graded to look teal and blue: http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-hollywood-please-stop.html However when cheaper cameras, better grading tools seeped into the masses, that style was felt to have been played out.

DI, the stage where the colour "grade" is tweaked, crafted and perfected is now an integral part of the edit/VFX stage. Colour is used to push emotion, just like sound and music design.

The bit about LUTs is mostly distraction. LUTs are normally used as a reference, to make sure that all the footage has roughly the same colour (important when you have different cameras for different scenes) They are static colour offsets, so are great for techincal colouring, but not overly useful for making an artistic grade.

TLDR: Its a fashion, just like the pricks who removed the obvious on/off indicators from slider buttons.

EDIT: If you want to see some interesting grading, look up "day for night" https://noamkroll.com/color-grading-tutorial-creating-a-day-for-night-look/ where they take normal footage and make it look like it was shot at night

It's not just films, a lot of TV programmes are heading that way too.

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-air-date-confirmed-trailer

[2] https://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-hollywood-please-stop.html

[3] I think the recent remasters release may have some colour grading in too though, just looking at some scenes they are darker!

It's non obvious. I really enjoyed this a few years ago [1]. I'd suggest looking up color correction in movies. There are more blogs about that, and due to the nature of the media they focus on the really effective stuff first. If there are cars, make the brake lights red, and all the same red. Make taxis that iconic yellow, even if they aren't that specific yellow in the shot.

Heavy handed, but if you're doing advertising where the best you can get is a fraction of a second, those heavy techniques will serve you well.

[1] http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-hollywood-please-stop.html?m=1

Maybe one can draw a comparison between the critics of the 1880s complaining about “harsh blue and garish lilac”, and the current complaints about movies being color-graded to teal and orange (“Seriously, I weep for cinema of this dark age. I think twenty years from now people will look at films of this era and say "My God - what were they smoking??!?” ---http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-hollywood-please-stop.html).

In both cases, the colors are striking and beautiful, or depending on your tastes, cheap and garish.