In the German side of the internet I see that there's a small trend of making jokes about how "acted" and (I'd say) "theatrical" voice actors and actors talk. Especially when you hear the original voice vs the German one.
But I have to admit, I almost enjoy it a bit for how fake and acted it sounds, it's very direct and consistent.
Especially after noticing that there's also a trend in English media where the acting tries to sound really serious but falls completely flat because of dialogue trying to be taken too serious, or because the scene not working that well in general, or worse, when the voices are so low you can't hear anything.
Yeah sure translating "Oh shit." with "Ach du Grüne Neune," (oh you green nine) is a bit ridiculous, and the very stage-actor voice used does make it a bit funnier than it should be. But at least I can understand the words, and it stays consistently weird, both voices and the funky dialogue choices.
Also, this is just a question. I see a lot of people mention how shit the lightning and the colors are in modern Hollywood movies. Here's the question: The same shit is going on with sound as well. Right?
I can watch movies from the 2000's and yeah, there'll be a few scenes where the soundscape may not have been properly mixed, across multiple movies, but these days every movie or show I watch seems to have several scenes with poor pronunciation, music being louder than dialogue, mumbling, or even just bad sound design in general.
Yes, the same shit is going on with sound.
There are two main culprits:
First, actors in the last couple of decades have been a lot less likely to have stage training where they're expected to reliably enunciate and project to the back row—and to memorize vast quantities of script at the drop of a hat and be able to start the scene from any line requested for that matter. In a US context, at least, a lot of actors don't necessarily have tons of formal acting training of any kind. This isn't always a bad thing, but enunciation does tend to suffer as a result.
Granted, we moved away from mannered stage style acting for film decades ago, but you can have naturalistic acting with clear diction, just not exaggeratedly clear diction.
Second, post production is not getting the money or care that it should and home theater setups get ever more absurd. Yes, I'm sure that suburban home totally needs an 8k television and surround sound. Suuuure. What are you compensating for?!
The single most obnoxious driver of this problem is cheapskates taking the 5.1 or 7.1 mix and squashing it into a stereo mix without adjusting it much.
When you have lots of speakers, you can have a lot more explosion noises and music and every other fucking thing going while keeping the dialogue clear because the dialogue is primarily coming out of the front speakers and is the main sound coming from there. It's similar to how most humans can still understand their conversation partner in a noisy room. If you can't look at them speaking or you have auditory processing problems, maybe not, but brains are usually pretty good at picking out human voices when they're coming from a specific human or even a specific source. We're better at picking out sounds when we're looking in that direction. (No, really, I worked in a science museum that had a display on this.) The setup in a movie theater makes it considerably easier to hear all that mumbly dialogue over action movie noises.
Not so the poorly-done stereo mix. Now, there are only two speakers. Our brain doesn't have the same ability to sort through the din to pick out the human voices when we're looking at one speaker blaring everything instead of a human face in a noisy room. If a stereo mix were done from scratch, as in the days when most things were stereo, the other sounds would get lowered during key dialogue.
The really bad examples you're encountering are probably the result of a semi-automatic 5.1 to stereo conversion.
Of course, limited budget and shoddy standards do lead to flat out bad sound design too, but I suspect a lot of it is thinking you can get the computer to do things that you really, really need an artistic touch for.
Also, if you're over like 30, you're probably starting to lose a little bit of hearing. It wouldn't have to be enough to count as proper hearing loss to start making dialogue sound more mumbly. Dialogue is worse now, obviously, but this could be exacerbating the very real issues with how Hollywood does sound mixing.
