Glad to have confirmation it was considerably darker on film…
Well, remember, after a scan, you can color-correct and grade the visual elements in whichever way you want. The new 4K may be film-sourced and a few points darker than the preexisting HD transfer, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s what it looked like on original theatrical release prints. What you see in the 4K is likely a regrade to give a film a slightly newer look. You’d need to track down an original 2004 print and have it projected to know what TSSM more or less looked like in theaters. My memory of the print shown at SVA in 2018 is that it looked identical to what’s on the home video releases, but even I’m beginning to question that because it’s been so long since I’ve seen the darn thing.
Are you certain this is how it looks with HDR, or is there a HDR grade that was supposed to be applied but wasn’t in these screenshots?
On an actual HDR-enabled display, it’s only a touch brighter than the screenshots I posted, which are tone-mapped SDR snapshots of the new transfer. But you’re still more or less seeing how the new version looks.
The regrade makes it look older
Have to agree, you can see in all my squabbling over the ‘original’ colors in this thread throughout the years, the one thing I was sure of was the dimmer color palette, whites appearing as grey and boosted saturation to compensate for that. It’s been 20 years since I saw the movie in theaters but it does line up with what I remember. I would not see it again for another few years on DVD, where it looked more vibrant and like the regular cartoon than I remember it looking. I’m sure most people prefer the digital master, and it’s likely how the movie was always intended to look, but I appreciate having the filmic version as well (if only by way of some haphazard Nick executive decision to simply get a 4K version out)