Why are movies so dark these days?

polygon.com:

“Why is everything so dark in new films?” has swiftly become one of the most common refrains in the moviegoing world. It first materialized in a big way back during the late seasons of Game of Thrones. Episode after episode, people furiously tweeted about how hard it was to see, well, anything going on on screen. A lot of explanations and theories have flooded the internet since then about a host of “dark” productions, some accurate (brutal streaming compression, suboptimal viewing conditions) and some decidedly less accurate. (No, it isn’t to “hide bad CG.”)

The truth can’t be boiled down to any one factor. But one key element has largely gone missing from this conversation: filmmaking choices, and the current trends that have directors producing darker imagery. If streaming compression is a necessary evil of modern distribution, and if viewers will choose to watch movies and shows in suboptimal conditions regardless of the filmmaker’s intent, then why are so many directors, DPs, and colorists designing their work in a manner that’s incompatible with how so many people view media nowadays? What benefit are filmmakers getting out of this? The answers are complicated.

And to get to those answers, we have to leave the conversations about technologyoff to the side. The real answers are based in form — meaning the visual language of a movie or a show — rather than shallow conversations about which evil modern camera is to blame, or about whether digital cameras handle light differently than film cameras. Tools are just tools. They can be wielded in half a million ways. For every murky, digitally shot, VFX-heavy production, there are others like Mad Max: Fury Road, The Matrix Resurrections, or Avatar: The Way of Water,which