what's popping ?

I used to be able to understand 99% of the dialogue in Hollywood films. But over the past 10 years or so, I've noticed that percentage has dropped significantly — and it's not due to hearing loss on my end. It's gotten to the point where I find myself occasionally not being able to parse entire lines of dialogue when I see a movie in a theater, and when I watch things at home, I've defaulted to turning the subtitles on to make sure I don't miss anything crucial to the plot.

its hard to hear words in movies because

1. directors like Christopher Nolan record fuzzy dialogue to make it more "realistic"

2. actors mumble or whisper to act their characters, and making it louder can't usually make the words clear in the finished movie

3. microphones have to be placed away from visual setpieces so they can't be seen in the finished movie, making it harder to put them where they can record the best audio

4. sound designers not being respected and time crunches with production mean they're often told to "fix it in post" (while editing the film) instead of being allowed to record good audio

5. people add extra sounds because they can add them easier now

6. working on a movie for so long means you can get so used to hearing the fuzzy words correctly that you don't realize other people can't understand it

7. sometimes movies are released too loud, and so movie theaters turn down the volume for all movies, making normal-volume movies too quiet

8. movie theater employees are more inexperienced and play the movie as it is originally, instead of making sure it sounds good like they did when they used projectors

9. some streaming platforms compress the audio too much, making it low quality and too hard to understand

10. tvs also sometimes change how the audio sounds

11. not all films have their sound changed by the people making it to sound good on a home tv