Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue

UK light is very different to California light.

Colours here really are washed out. A long time ago I was in Australia. My then gf bought a bedspread by an artist called Ken Done - lots of bright primary colours.

It looked great in Sydney.

In UK light - even in sunlight - most of the colour punch disappeared. It actually looked kind of grey and old. Disappointment...

So if supersaturate movie colours, they look surreal here.

But California really is teal and orange. The light is warm and intense, and LA gets a lot of clear blue sky. So I wonder if directors like TnO because it's a variation on natural Hollywood light.

One argument in favor of using orange-blue as opposed to other contrasting colors, is that humans associate blue with darkness and depth. Our eyes and mind, too, perceive blue at a lower resolution as other colors (We perceive green with the greatest fidelity).

Colorizing the screen in orange and blue, then, imposes a hierarchy on the objects in the screen. Whereever the orange-blue scheme is used, the blue depicts the background and the orange depicts the action.

This adds to the illusion of depth, which is extremely important especially for Hollywood action films, as they need to feel big and grand amid fast-paced movement and short takes. Where objects flash across the screen in split seconds, the orange-blue contrast can provide a natural vocabulary to re-orient the viewer as to what is happening in the 3D space depicted by the 2D screen.

I would guess that the blue-green colorscheme is overrepresented in action films and especially in action sequences, and underrepresented in say, comedy and romance films.