The Colors of Movie Trailers

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Well this is rather interesting. Box Office Quant analyzed a whole bunch of movie trailers in order to figure out which were the most common colors onscreen.  Not sure how they did it, but they have a chart, so it must be legit.

As it turns out, Oranges and Blues are the most common colors by a mile because of what…sunlight and explosions? Water and hot blue-eyed actresses? I’m not sure. But it’s really no surprise considering the two are complimentary colors and they’ve been doing this for years with movie posters.

Poor purple and green. I guess we need more Incredible Hulk movies to balance things out.

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3 Comments

  1. Blue and orange are complementary, so probably mostly used together. That makes sense. Where’s black and white though? I bet they’d be pretty high on the chart as well, but tones and shades are harder to measure.

  2. It just has to do with color temperature. Sunlight vs incandescent light vs fluorescent lights. The temperature from warm to cool is orange to blue. And because of this, movies are often timed to be either more blue or more orange.

    If it were analyzing just the graphics/titles/logos alone, I think the result would be very different, though the orange/blue combo is also popular in graphics.

  3. They overdo this color scheme to movies on blu-ray. I haven’t bought a blu-ray player yet because of this. Old black and white movies aren’t re-released in color, never to be seen in b&W again. So why are all the old color movies getting retouched?

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