Subs Not Dubs

How the rise in subtitle use is contributing to the popularity of non-English media

A few days ago, I went to see Ryan Coogler’s vampire period piece Sinners at my local movie theater. Seeing the movie in theaters was an incredible experience, as many of Coogler’s production decisions were clearly made with the theatrical viewing experience in mind.

Coogler became the first director to shoot a movie in both Ultra Panavision 70 and IMAX formats, creating a unique aspect ratio that is prohibitively expensive for most people to recreate at home. And since Sinners tells a vampire tale, there are plenty of horror moments that are heightened by the reactions of dozens of others theatergoers reacting with you in real time.

But the best reason to see Sinners in a movie theater is the audio. Without giving much of the plot away, a key component of the story is the main character’s musical talents, which means the film’s soundtrack — which incorporates a surprising variety of genres for a period piece — functions almost as a character in its own right. My dirt-cheap soundbar and sole subwoofer whimper in comparison to the audio setup at even the lowest of budget theaters.

There was however one element of the in-theater experience that had me longing for my apartment’s television. Sinners is set in rural Mississippi in the year 1932, which means the characters speak with accents pulled straight out of a time machine. Embarrassing as it may be, there were moments where I failed to understand a few lines of dialogue spoken in my native language.

At home, I watch every movie and TV show with subtitles. I’m not alone. An oft-cited survey conducted by Preply in 2023 found that 50% of people in the United States watch media with subtitles turned on most of the time. That figure jumps to a staggering 70% for Gen Z respondents. In fact, Gen Z watches media with subtitles¹ at double the rate of the oldest group in the survey, Baby Boomers, despite the association of subtitle use with hearing loss.

At no point in my life have I been diagnosed with a hearing issue or audio processing disability. According to the National Institute of Health on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, 15% of Americans have some form of hearing difficulty. That’s a significant figure, but a far cry from the 50% of Americans who opt for subtitles when watching media. And since the same dataset reports that just 5% of Americans ages 45-54 have disabling hearing loss (the youngest age group for which this figure is provided), it is clear that Gen Z’s preference for subtitles has little to do with accessibility.

Respondents to the same Preply survey who reported using subtitles listed the difficulty of understanding dialogue due to background music as the most popular reason for activating subtitles. While I agree with this reasoning, I still found myself surprised by how widespread this opinion is. With the dramatic improvements in audio and video editing tools available now compared to those of decades past, I would have expected audio composition to have become more refined, not less.

But when considering the parallel changes in how media is consumed, some of the perceived failures of audio editing become excusable. Twenty years ago, Apple released the iPod Classic, which was the first iPod that could also play visual media. Debuting just seven years after the first portable DVD player, users were slow to add movies and TV shows to their digital libraries; an Associated Press story from 2006 reports that just 11% of iPod Classic use was video streaming.

Also in 2006, Microsoft released its first portable media player, the Zune 30. The device supported both audio and visual media, and unlike the iPod Classic, which only supported MPEG-4 for video playback, the Zune 30 could play both MPEG-4 files and WMV files. Dueling standards had been created.

As the Zune and iPod evolved, so too did their playback capabilities. Successive generations of each device supported newer and better audio and visual file types and resolutions, but the technical specifications never aligned. The same issue played out in the home media market.

While Apple conquered the portable media player market, Blu-ray was slowly vanquishing its now-forgotten competitor, HD DVD. But the format wars were a grind, and from the release of Blu-ray and HD DVD in the spring of 2006 until the discontinuation of HD DVD in 2008, it was unclear which would reign supreme. As with Zune and the iPod, there were differences in the encoding capabilities of Blu-ray and HD DVD discs.

The majority of users will never notice variations in audio encoding specifications, but audio engineers — like those working in Hollywood — certainly will. In periods of uncertain formats, audio professionals are left unsure of how to best edit the final product of their movie or TV show. If you were a Warner Brothers audio technician in 2007, would you cut the home release of 300 to be best suited for Blu-ray? The iPod? And what about over-the-air broadcasts?

It may appear that streaming has simplified the formatting decision process. After all, the overwhelming majority of Americans use at least one streaming service, just as the majority of Americans watch movies at home. And with sales of physical media continuing to plummet, it stands to reason that movie makers should optimize their home releases for streaming.

Except not only do encoding specifications vary from streaming service to streaming service, encoding can even vary across the same platform. Amazon and Netflix use AV1 for audio encoding, while HBO and Hulu feature AC3 audio, which is also known as Dolby Digital. But on most of these services, if you pay more, you gain access to 4K video and higher-quality audio formats like HDR and Dolby Atmos. Good luck adjusting your TV and speaker settings to match!

I have grossly oversimplified both the audio production process and the variety of audio and visual media formats, but the overall conclusion is clear; it’s not your fault that, despite having a 4K TV, AppleTV, brand new HDMI cords, and a full surround sound speaker setup, the gorgeous background music is drowning out the dialogue between Pen and Colin as you stream the latest episode of Bridgerton.

Individual decisions to assemble a film in H.264 instead of H.265 or to encode audio as AC3 instead of MP3 may not have significant impacts on the intelligibility of your final product, but taken together these choices compound to the point where you are reaching for the remote to adjust the audio between each scene. A combat scene or musical interlude forces you to turn your volume down multiple notches, only for the next conversation to come off as a nigh-whisper. At-home media consumption now requires active participation.

Or you could just use subtitles. By placing the dialogue directly on the screen, you obviate the need to adjust the volume as a movie plays and can instead keep your speakers as low as is necessary to avoid waking up your neighbors during the next sequence of explosions or guitar riffs.

There are other logical reasons that viewers, especially those in Gen Z, opt for subtitles. In the United States, 83%² of viewers 16 and older use their phone while watching media. Distracted viewers are more likely to need captions to follow the plot.

The internet has also made it easier than ever to consume media from around the world, increasing the opportunities to watch movies with dialogue written in your native language but spoken with an unfamiliar inflection. I loved the show Derry Girls, but there were moments where I would have been utterly lost without subtitles thanks to the characters’ Irish accents, which were so accurate to the Derry region as to draw praise from Irish viewers.

In 2020, Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite made history as the first non-English film to win the Oscar for Best Picture. A month before he made history with his Oscar victory, Bong gave an acceptance speech at the Golden Globes, where Parasite won the award for Best Foreign Language Film. In his remarks, which were fittingly delivered in Korean, Bong implored Americans to “overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles” so as to be “introduced to so many more amazing films.”

In the years since, foreign-language media consumption has exploded. The last three Best Picture winners, CODA, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Anora, are all American-made movies, but each feature extensive use of non-English dialogue. The United States’ share of demand for non-English media has increased by roughly 3% since Bong’s speech, and recent smash hits like All Quiet on the Western Front and Squid Games only show the strength of this trend.

The globalization of movies and TV has a myriad of factors, the largest of which by far is the accessibility of the internet. But I believe that younger viewers overcoming the long-standing aversion to subtitles, driven in large part by the ever-increasing variety of audio encoding, is another major factor in the rising popularity of non-English media. After all, if you already turn on subtitles to watch Andor, what is stopping you from watching La casa de papel?

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Things I Recommend This Week

• The Fall of (Big)law |

  debrief with cece xie
  (Substack)

• This Sahara Railway Is One of the Most Extreme in the World | National Geographic (YouTube)

• The Code That Controls Your Money | Wealthsimple Magazine

• Inside North Korea’s Forced-Labor Program | The New Yorker

• Small Nations In Big Wars | Defector

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I hope you are enjoying your Memorial Day holiday, which marks the unofficial start of the best season of the year, summer! Thank you for reading, and remember, always choose subs over dubs.

1. Technically, my preferred format is closed captioning rather than subtitling, but in mainstream discourse the terms are interchangeable, so I use the term subtitles throughout this essay.

2. Weirdly, this is the exact same percentage as the figure for Americans with a streaming subscription.