Like text with your images? Live in a U.S. market with more than two AMC theaters? You're in luck. Hundreds of AMC locations just started offering "open caption" screenings of all new releases. This is, of course, a win for accessibility advocates, and for foreign movie buffs who want the subtitling experience to be less of an afterthought.
But it's also a win for a lesser-known group of visual entertainment lovers: those whose hearing is fine but actually prefer subtitles on English-language movies and TV shows. Our reasons vary. Some are frustrated by sound mixing that dials up the explosions; others are troubled by British accents on shows like Peaky Blinders or Great British Bake-Off. (As a Brit, I find this fascinating; is "soggy bottom" really that hard to understand?) Even U.S. shows can be too mumbly: subtitles "made all the difference in Deadwood," a Detroit friend told me.
Still others, like me, see the subtitled version as one that rewards close attention. We enjoy catching details that otherwise whiz by too fast. It's like an easter egg hunt; you can learn character names and see dialogue from background characters that we were barely intended to hear. "My brain likes not missing any words," one friend said. "You sometimes discover the kind of overlapping dialogue that you might associate with a Robert Altman movie," offered another.
And yes, having those words on the screen helps if we happen to have, uh, accidentally glanced down at our phone during a given scene. Not that any of us in our modern, totally un-distracted world would be double-screening or anything.
Subtitles for the young
Estimating the numbers of caption fans is a tricky business, but I have reason to believe subtitle lovers might be in the majority. My informal Twitter poll on the subject has seen a surprising 75-25 split in favor of subtitles; similar numbers in a 2019 TVLine poll said they "always" or "very often" favored them even though their hearing is "technically A-OK." (There may or may not be a significant connection to the 70 percent of viewers in one survey who admitted to double-screening.)
For years, I've been asking friends whether they too have their subtitles on by default on every streaming service, and have been surprised by the amount who say yes — especially among millennial and Gen Z cohorts. Some parents are mystified. "My 16-year old insists on subtitles," one mother told me. Mashable alum Lance Ulanoff, intrigued by his daughter's love of subtitles, found hundreds of parents in the same boat, and an adolescent psychiatrist who believes this is happening because "auditory processing is more easily impacted by distractions."
But maybe the increasing number of screens on offer in the average family den is only part of the story. Maybe the same culturally borderless internet natives raised on anime classics, Squid Game, and other international Netflix faves, are more likely to see subtitles as the norm. Captions are a few clicks away on any given TV, but they can still be a pain to turn on and off; you might as well have them on all the time anyway, especially when life is happening and your family and friends are in the same room, on their own screens, talking over the action.
Whatever the reason, the popularity of captions among younger viewers is a sign that subtitles aren't just for the hard-of-hearing olds. They are also the future. By the time Gen Z is in charge of the universe — roughly speaking, the 2040s and on — we can expect subtitles to have evolved to the point where they are customizable and less of an afterthought. Because even the biggest caption fan has to admit there are some serious problems with the format as it stands.
Still, maybe our love of adding text to a screen is slowly turning TV into a new kind of medium. One that is both very 21st century — and also hearkens back to one of the most popular graphic formats of the last hundred years.
I want my comic-book TV
It wasn't until a local comic book store owner confessed his love of subtitles that it clicked: Of course. Add text to a TV screen, and what you've got is a moving comic book.
In the era of the mighty Marvel Cinematic Universe, now that the comics industry is increasingly seen as a proving ground for future blockbusters on the big and small screen alike, and when advanced CGI makes a lot of our entertainment look like comic books anyway, the two mediums seem destined to collide sooner or later. (As they did in Into the Spiderverse, and likely will do again in that movie's 2022 sequel.)
Not that caption-makers currently take as much care as comics creators, who tend to agonize over the placement of speech bubbles lest they interfere with all that painstaking art. I can't be the only caption lover frustrated by those few minutes at the start of an episode when subtitles appear at the top of the screen, often covering characters' faces.
The reason: those pesky opening credits, where producers, directors and stars get their names emblazoned in big letters. Sooner or later, either these egos will have to content themselves with a comic book-style credits box on the side (seems unlikely), or our streaming services will have to find a different placement for captions. How about, y'know, not having them over the actual picture at all? If Apple can normalize the troublesome notch, then Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and all the rest can normalize the sub-screen subtitle bar.
That should help with the complaints of significant others (like mine) who have learned to live with their subtitle lovers but still find captions aesthetically displeasing. Here are a few other fixes that would go a long way towards improving their experience: allow us to reduce the size of caption text; never put them in all caps (they're subtitles, not shout-titles); give us the option of captions that don't describe non-dialogue noises. I can't say I'll be unhappy if I never see the words "[ominous music]" or "[no audible dialogue]" ever again.
The number one complaint of caption haters in my social circles: Too often, the subtitles are out of sync with the spoken dialogue. Lagging behind is bad, but captions that are ahead of the game are often worse — mini-spoilers, in effect. (This early punchline aspect of subtitles is why I'll usually turn them off when watching stand-up comedy.) Given how easy it is for AI to identify where in a script the dialogue is at any given second, out-of-sync subtitles should be as unacceptable for streaming services as an out-of-sync soundtrack.
Here's what will put a stop to such subtitle neglect: Caption lovers getting loud and talking with our dollars. When you next prune the list of streaming services you're paying for, consider supporting the ones with the best caption services (right now, in my experience, Apple TV+ is the gold standard) and ditching the ones that shout at us in badly-synced all caps placed carelessly over a lead actor's head. When you go to the movies, choose an open caption screening. Entertainment execs might have the sound turned down on us right now, but they can still read between the lines.
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