What the hell is going on? Well, back in the day, the colors projected on the silver screen depended first on how you shot and developed the actual, physical film, and then whether or not you had somebody go through and painstakingly, expensively apply more colors to every frame.
Now, most movies are shot digitally and it’s a lot easier to go back and rebalance things to achieve whatever affect you want. But someone still needs to actually do it. And if it doesn’t look good, that person gets in trouble.
O’ Brother Where Art Thou(2000) gets referenced a lot as an early movie to heavily digitally color grade. The Coens reportedly wanted it to look retrograde at the expense of realism, which is why it was graded so heavily: the entire movie is a nice warm sepia. The cinematographer on the film has said, “They wanted it to look like an old hand-tinted picture, with the intensity of colors dictated by the scene and natural skin tones that were all shades of the rainbow.”
But how did we get from “all the shades of the rainbow” to “orange”?