🎬WHEN STREAMING BECOMES VANDALISM

There’s a difference between distributing cinema and defacing it. Netflix has long claimed to be a global champion of storytelling, but with Dhurandhar, the platform exposes its ugliest truth: it does not respect cinema as cinema.

What should have been a lush, immersive visual experience is now reduced to a dust-choked, lifeless, post-apocalyptic haze. Lyari doesn’t feel lived-in anymore—it feels abandoned, drained, and aggressively flattened. Not by the filmmaker. Not by the cinematographer. But by Netflix’s obsessive, soulless urge to enforce its infamous “house look.”

This isn’t a creative intervention.
This is aesthetic colonisation.

🎥 THE ORIGINAL SIN: DESTROYING GORGEOUS CINEMATOGRAPHY

Dhurandhar was shot with intent. With texture. With atmosphere. With a sense of place that breathed through light, shadow, contrast, and color separation.

Netflix took that and asked one fatal question:
“Can we make this look more… Netflix?”

The answer, apparently, was:

• Crush the blacks

• Smother highlights

• Kill color depth

• Drown everything in murky browns and lifeless greys

• 
  

What once had visual poetry now looks like it’s been passed through a generic LUT designed for cheap binge content.

This isn’t grading.
This is visual vandalism.

🟤 THE BROWN PALETTE PROBLEM: WHEN EVERYTHING LOOKS DEAD

Let’s talk about that shitty brown, dusty, desaturated palette.

Netflix seems obsessed with one idea:

“Serious = dull. Gritty = colorless. Real = ugly.”

So every frame is coated in the same muddy aesthetic until:

• Skin tones look sick

• Environments lose character

• Night scenes bleed into nothingness

• Daylight feels radioactive

• 
  

Lyari doesn’t feel intense or raw anymore—it feels like it exists in a post-apocalyptic void where sunlight has been outlawed.

Color isn’t decoration.
Color is narrative language.
And Netflix doesn’t speak it.

🧠 zero SENSE OF VISUAL LANGUAGE

cinema is not content.
Cinematography is not an adjustable brightness slider.

Netflix executives and post-production supervisors consistently prove they do not understand visual storytelling. They treat films the same way they treat thumbnails: flatten, simplify, neutralize—make it “acceptable” on every cheap TV, phone, and tablet.

The result?

• No respect for contrast

• No respect for the shadow

• No respect for regional visual identity

• No respect for the filmmaker’s eye

• 
  

Everything must look equally bland so nothing challenges the algorithm.

That’s not curation.
That’s creative cowardice.

📺 WHY OTT PLATFORMS ARE THE WORST PLACE FOR CINEMA

OTT platforms—especially Netflix—are control freaks.

They don’t just decide what you watch.
They aggressively dictate how it should look.

Aspect ratios are “suggestions.”
Color grades are “optimized.”
Textures are “cleaned up.”

And suddenly, cinema becomes assembly-line sludge.

This is why serious filmmakers still fear streaming premieres. Because once your film enters the Netflix pipeline, it’s no longer fully yours.

It’s been processed.

🧟‍♂️ THE “NETFLIX LOOK”: A CREATIVE DISEASE

The so-called “Netflix Look” is not a style.
It’s a symptom.

A symptom of:

• Algorithm-first thinking

• Data over instinct

• Uniformity over individuality

• 
  

When every film starts resembling every other film, cinema stops being cinema and becomes background noise.

Dhurandhar didn’t need fixing.
Netflix needed restraint.

⚠️ FINAL VERDICT: THIS WAS A ROBBERY, NOT A RELEASE

Netflix didn’t just tone down Dhurandhar.
They robbed audiences of a carefully crafted visual experience.

What should have been absorbed on a big screen—or at least respected in its original grade—has been reduced to a dull, lifeless approximation of what cinema once was.

This is why, increasingly, OTT platforms are not the future of cinema.
They are its most dangerous compromise.

And if this keeps going, we won’t just lose films.
We’ll lose the language of cinema itself.