Because they insist on mixing the audio in a shitty way so unless you want to fiddle with the audio-level every 5 seconds or have your eardrums shattered by action/suspense-scenes, you can’t hear dialogue and need subs to understand what the fuck is going on…

Edit: and before people start saying “5.1 in stereo is the cause!1!!1!1”, no forcing stereo does absolutely nothing to alleviate this.

The ‘problem’ is dynamic range. They mix movies with a large dynamic range because explosions and shit are a lot louder than spoken words. You are supposed to have your eardrums shattered during action scenes. That’s hot it’s intended to be listened to.

Could they mix it differently? Sure, but that would mean that the people who want to watch it as intended can’t. There is also no reason to because you can simply adjust this during playback. Any half-decent A/V receiver will have an option for dynamic range compression. Just because you didn’t set up your surround sound system properly doesn’t mean the movie is badly mixed.

I don’t have a surround system…I have 2.1 stereo, and even with dynamic range compression this is an issue.

I don’t want eardrums shattered when watching a movie, nobody wants that, it’s unpleasant and 100% unnecessary for watching at home.

I don’t want eardrums shattered when watching a movie, nobody wants that, it’s unpleasant and 100% unnecessary for watching at home.

They don’t mix for a 2.1 home setup, they mix for a (home) theater. You’re using a set-up meant to watch the news and maybe a soccer match to watch a movie and then complain that it’s a crappy experience. Yeah, no shit.

Cool, so you’re not allowed a good passable movie experience if you don’t invest a shitton of money for a home theater.

You have a setup that’s not suitable for watching movies and you’re trying to blame it on the movie. How is that reasonable? The content you’re trying to watch simply was never meant to be watched in that way. I’m not sure what you expect here.

Even if they did a different mix, that still wouldn’t give the intended experience of the movie, it would be at best a watered down version. You simply cannot optimize for two very different things. If they wanted it to be viewed on a TV they would have made a very different movie to begin with. There are plenty of made-for-TV movies that do exactly that.

You expect that something that was made to be shown on a huge screen, in a dark room with a high end sound system somehow magically would work on your living room TV with stereo sound. I don’t think that’s a reasonable expectation.

I’m not sure why you get so much down voted while you are right. It’s similar how people want to play a 4k movie on a 1080p screen…

Personally, I have experienced that when you’re downmixing a 5.1 to 2.1 solves all the issues OP is talking about.

I’m only an amateur but did some video/audio encoding and it’s a bit more complex than what I’m saying here, but it does indead solves the issue.

I’m not sure why you get so much down voted while you are right. It’s similar how people want to play a 4k movie on a 1080p screen…

People underestimate how big of a difference it makes.

If you ever get the chance to do this on a decent home theater: grab a blu-ray copy of the LoTR trilogy. 1080p, 5.1 audio. Should be pretty good right? Watch it for a couple of minutes. Then switch to the UHD blu-ray (4k HDR, Dolby Atmos). It’s a night and day difference. The 1080p version is fine, but the UHD version just draws you in. It’s almost addictive, once you turn it on you can’t look away. Before you know it you’ve watched the entire trilogy.

It’s shocking how much better the experience is, it’s like a completely different movie.