Updated April 21, 2025 at 18:00 PM ET
Some of Hollywood's most iconic movies are often the most quotable. Think Rhett Butler's, "Frankly my dear I don't give a damn" from Gone with the Wind or Star Wars' "May the force be with you" or Arnold Schwarzenegger's legendary "I'll be back" from The Terminator.
But it's hard to remember movie quotes when you can't hear the dialogue.
A survey by the language learning site Preply found that more than half of the 1,260 Americans surveyed say they're watching shows with subtitles on because the soundtracks are too hard to understand.
That reliance on subtitles breaks the heart of Academy Award-winning sound editor Karen Baker Landers.
"I hate nothing more than when I've spent months working on a film, doing the sound and people say, what did they say?," she said.
Landers said a lot of factors can influence dialogue clarity. Number one on her list? Not hiring the right people for the job.
"I've worked on a couple of movies recently where the production recordist was very inexperienced [and] was hired because he was cheap," she said.
In the early days of filmmaking, actors had to project their voices and enunciate clearly so the microphones of the time could pick up their voices. Microphone technology has come a long way over the decades and yet speech clarity seems to have gotten worse. Because mics are more sensitive they allow actors to deliver a softer, more-nuanced performance. But there's a fine line between nuance and mumbling, according to Matt Singer, editor of ScreenCrush.com.
"I just saw Mickey 17, the new Bong Joon Ho film," Singer said. The lead actor Robert Pattinson, I think, does a very good job. But he's doing a voice, a [soft] character voice and I was like, what? What did he say?"
Layered sound design adds to the problem. Directors often stack sound effects on top ambient backgrounds, on top of music, on top of more sound effects. Christopher Nolan is best known for this dense approach. His films include Interstellar, Tenet and The Dark Knight Rises. Nolan defended his philosophy in a 2014 interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
"I don't agree with the idea that you can only achieve clarity through dialogue. Clarity of story, clarity of emotions — I try to achieve that in a very layered way using all the different things at my disposal — picture and sound." Singer described Nolan's style as "a choice to use dialogue almost as a sound effect."
How and where you're watching matters too. If you're at home or on your phone using a streaming service like Netflix or Disney+ you're likely hearing compressed audio. Streaming platforms compress sound to help prevent buffering which can really mess with the clarity.
Landers pointed out there's no industry-wide compression standard — which helps explain why the same movie can sound fine on one streaming service but not-so-good on another.
And then there's the equipment itself. It doesn't help if your big-screen TV has tiny, tinny speakers on the back that project sound toward the wall instead of the viewer.
So, between mumbling actors, multi-layered soundtracks and small speakers on big TVs, an easy solution isn't exactly in sight — or sound.
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