The movies are made to be played on fancy, calibrated, Dolby atmos speakers in the theater and when you play at home, they don’t compensate for it. Ideally they would make 2 versions, one for theaters and one for homes
Watch using windows 10 computer, right click on sound in task bar, go to “sounds”, click on “playback”, double click on your output, go to “enhancements” and enable “loudness equalization”
It’s a MIRACLE. You can hear voices AND explosions don’t ruin your ears!
Horror games and movies it’s PERFECT for. Music is the only time it REALLY falters. Some games are all messed up when it’s on, but for horror stuff it’s perfect.
My podcast program I use, Overcast, has something called Voice Boost. It does the same thing and it makes podcasts listenable with my car’s crazy sound system and sub (I am not shilling, I haven’t paid for it and I should but I never buy phone programs… even though I probably should I know I suck)
In part due to this, it has also become trendy and normalised to have bassy dialogue and lots of environmental noise, because that's the expected "epic movie" feel.
So it's almost become a self-fulfilling prophecy that movies will sound this way, regardless of the anticipated audio hardware.
I went to see a film with my mate just last week at the pictures, and I ended up needing the foreign subtitles, so after it had finished I turned to him and said "could you hear a fucking word any of them were saying?" he said "I was going to say that!" This was the film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_We_Start_From so there are parts where I assume you're supposed to be seeing things through her eyes and she's all discombobulated, but then why have subtitles if that's the case?