The curse of the physical collector has always been changes to newer formats. Just when your LaserDisc or VHS collection is looking great, DVD comes out, and you have to buy the better version of movies you already own, then rinse and repeat with Blu-ray, and now 4K UHD.
The expectation is that with each new better version of home media, the movie should look better, and closer to what the creators intended. However, some movies seem to have wildly different looks in each version, not just better fidelity. With color and contrast in particular fluctuating with each new release. Why?
How Color Worked and Works in Movies
Modern movies are almost all shot on digital cameras, and even those that aren’t are digitized after the fact anyway. This allows for something known as “color grading”, where a film color specialist can very precisely adjust all the colors, contrast, and other aspects of the picture as part of the post-production process. This is why movies are filmed using a flat neutral color grade, allowing plenty of leeway after the fact. That’s why movies these days can have such specific looks.
However, when film was the only option, the changes you could make to a movie after it was already on film were limited. Most of the color work had to be done in-camera, using scene lighting and filters on the camera lens. You could do some tinting later, but not with a high degree of precision.
Then, when a movie was copied to the film reels used in every individual cinema, those copies would not be consistent. Many different film processing companies with slightly different equipment and methods would make the copies for cinematic release. Which meant that the exact coloration of the movie you saw in the cinema could be different depending on which copy you saw. Later, with home releases on formats like VHS, the film might undergo yet another color alteration in the process of transferring the print to VHS.
The Matrix is notorious for having wildly different color treatments depending on which version you buy. Have a look at this comparison of Matrix versions and see how dramatically different each one looks. For a lot of people, myself included, the DVD version is “definitive”, but that’s not what it looked like in theaters (probably) and it’s not what was intended.
Now the 4K UHD version looks “off”, but according to the filmmakers, this is what they intended it to look like from the start.
With Every Movie Release, They Take Another Crack at the Color
It’s not just The Matrix that shows this variability in color. It’s pretty common for whoever is responsible for a new home release of a film (or even perhaps a new streaming release) to fiddle with the picture. It might not always be as dramatic as The Matrix, but the differences are there.
I can understand the temptation when you’re told you have another shot at presenting your film to the world. It’s no different from George Lucas wanting to redo the CG in his older movies, as one famous example. No one is ever 100% happy with their own work, even if we think it’s wonderful and perfect the way it is.
Early Home Releases Didn’t Match the Look in Cinemas
It’s not always a deliberate change made in the color-grading suite either. With more bandwidth, more bit depth, and better TVs, there’s nuance and color that simply wasn’t visible before.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that modern TVs have features like Dolby Vision and Filmmaker Modes, that present movies and shows more closely to what their makers intended them to look like, not how we remember watching them on DVD two decades ago using TV equipment that wasn’t even trying to be accurate.
The Latest Releases Are More Cinema Accurate, but Not What We Remember
With modern formats like UHD Blu-ray, it’s possible to match what the movie was meant to look like. It’s just that, apart from the few times we might have seen it in the cinema, we don’t actually know what the intended version is meant to be. In fact, we don’t even know if these new versions are more accurate to the original cinema look of the movie. We only have their word to take for it, because that version only exists in memory.
Even if you took an original cinema reel and watched it in a period-accurate cinema today, the film itself has degraded with time and the color has changed. Unlike digital cinema masters, which remain exactly the same no matter how much time passes (assuming the data isn’t corrupted), analog film versions will simply degrade over time. So honestly, whether the latest version really is more inline with what it would have looked like is anyone’s guess.
There’s No “Right” Version of a Movie When It Comes to Color
In a movie, color is part of the artistic intent. It’s an entire distinct discipline within the art of film. However, there’s no “correct” version of a film’s color, just a version deliberately created for a specific purpose. In the case of The Matrix, many people my age will consider the DVD version the way the movie “should” look, but later people who see one of the Blu-ray or streaming versions first might have the same feeling about that version.
So, in the end, I guess it comes down to which version you personally like the most, and whether you care what the creator of the film intended or not. I’ll be watching my Michael Bay films in the original eye-searing orange and teal as the man intended.
