Has This YouTuber Finally Managed to Describe Why Modern Movies Often Look So Bad?

Modern cinema looks bad. It might feel like an increasingly cliché and tired thing to say, and it’s a point of view we’ve certainly put across here more than a few times, but that’s for a very good reason: Yes, there are exceptions, of course, but it can’t be denied that if you took a random visual sample of any mainstream movie from 2025 and compared it one taken from 1975, 1985, 1995, 2005, or, frankly, even 2015, you would be able to see an undeniable shift to a particular visual quality and style that cuts across genres and creative teams and that we had never seen so much of before.

Clearly, we’re not the only ones feeling it here, as there is a video that has just gone viral from a YouTube channel that I’d never really expect that from. ‘Like Stories of Old’ is a lovely channel that makes videos which ‘explore the boundary between media analysis, philosophy and personal development in an empathic, emotionally resonant way’. I’ve been following him for a few years, but I’ve never seen one of his videos get nowhere as much reach as this one—2 million and counting 4 days after it was released. Clearly, it’s resonating with a lot of people; something also borne out by how many film-focused subreddits it’s taken over and the length of discussion—much of it in agreement—it has caused there.

I think his video, ‘Why Movies Just Don’t Feel “Real” Anymore’, is being seen and talked about so much is because he brings some views to the table that aren’t spoken about nearly as much as others. He doesn’t simplify things to the oft-repeated digital versus analog binary—seeing that argument as reductive when on one hand films like Avatar: The Way Of Water and Collateral exist, and on the other a number of modern films shot on film suffer from the same visual malaise as all-digital ones. Instead, he attributes the shift to a number of inter-related and interacting factors, including:

- a preponderance of shallow depth of field in modern cinematography
- a lack of detail in the background of films
- those backgrounds often being entirely green screen
- there being no real interaction between the actors and scenery as a result, as well as a lack of feeling that the two exist in the same physical space
- actors and wardrobe all looking too pristine

There are more, and there is much more depth to this, and he presents it all very well, and if you’ve been feeling much like we have, then you may find yourself nodding vigorously here: