Movie colour palettes
Colour palettes for 5,277 films, measured rather than picked. Every frame carries five extracted colours; pooled per film, they give the six dominant colours with the share of the image each one covers, plus warmth, saturation and luminance.
1,568 films are well-known enough to rank. 475 are monochrome and are ranked separately — hue says nothing about a black-and-white film.
The warmest films
Highest lean toward red and orange, weighted by saturation. Black-and-white films are excluded — they have no hue to lean.
The Godfather
1972 · Francis Ford Coppola
The Road
2009 · John Hillcoat
The Illusionist
2006 · Neil Burger
Mary & Max
2009 · Adam Elliot
The Fountain
2006 · Darren Aronofsky
Before Sunset
2004 · Richard Linklater
Spectre
2015 · Sam Mendes
The Immortals
2011 · Tarsem Singh
Amsterdam
2022 · David O. Russell
Jarhead
Sam Mendes
mother!
2017 · Darren Aronofsky
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
1969 · George Roy Hill
The coolest films
Strongest lean toward blue and cyan across the sampled frames.
The Abyss
1989 · James Cameron
Underworld: Blood Wars
2016 · Anna Foerster
The Ring
2002 · Gore Verbinski
Minority Report
Steven Spielberg
Avatar
2009 · James Cameron
TRON: Legacy
2010 · Joseph Kosinski
Oxygen
2021 · Alexandre Aja
Resident Evil
2002 · Paul W. S. Anderson
The Shallows
2016 · Jaume Collet-Serra
Margin Call
2011 · J.C. Chandor
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
2004 · Alfonso Cuarón
Source Code
2011 · Duncan Jones
The most saturated films
Highest mean saturation. Animation dominates this list, which is what the measurement should show.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie
2023 · Aaron Horvath
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners
2022 · Rafał Jaki
Elemental
2023 · Peter Sohn
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
2023 · Kemp Powers
Inside Out 2
2024 · Kelsey Mann
Aladdin
1992 · Ron Clements
Turning Red
2022 · Domee Shi
Ralph Breaks the Internet
2018 · Phil Johnston
Mandy
2018 · Panos Cosmatos
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
2022 · Joel Crawford
Cars
2006 · John Lasseter
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
2018 · Bob Persichetti
The most desaturated films
Lowest mean saturation among films that still carry colour — the bleached and muted grades, not the monochrome ones.
Sin City: A Dame to Kill For
2014 · Frank Miller
Law Abiding Citizen
2009 · F. Gary Gray
The Raid
2012 · Gareth Evans
The Babadook
2014 · Jennifer Kent
Inside Llewyn Davis
2013 · Joel Coen
Hannibal
2001 · Ridley Scott
The Equalizer 3
2023 · Antoine Fuqua
The Machinist
2004 · Brad Anderson
The French Dispatch
2021 · Wes Anderson
Capote
2005 · Bennett Miller
The Whale
2022 · Darren Aronofsky
Gran Torino
2008 · Clint Eastwood
The darkest films
Lowest mean luminance across sampled frames.
Green Room
2015 · Jeremy Saulnier
Triple 9
2016 · John Hillcoat
Overlord
2018 · Julius Avery
Fright Night
2011 · Craig Gillespie
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
2014 · Matt Reeves
Mandy
2018 · Panos Cosmatos
Evil Dead Rise
2023 · Lee Cronin
Dark Waters
2019 · Todd Haynes
Buried
2010 · Rodrigo Cortés
Ash
2025 · James Cameron
The Road
2009 · John Hillcoat
Saw V
2008 · David Hackl
The brightest films
Highest mean luminance across sampled frames.
Barbie
2023 · Greta Gerwig
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
2006 · Mamoru Hosoda
The Angry Birds Movie 2
2019 · Thurop Van Orman
The Cat In The Hat
2003 · Bo Welch
Wreck-It Ralph
2012 · Rich Moore
White Chicks
2004 · Keenen Ivory Wayans
The Boss Baby
2017 · Tom McGrath
Super Size Me
2004 · Morgan Spurlock
Inside Out
2015 · Pete Docter
Sing
2016 · Garth Jennings
Your Name
2016 · Makoto Shinkai
Despicable Me 4
2024 · Chris Renaud
Black and white
475 films measure below 0.05 mean saturation. Ranked by how widely seen they are, since hue cannot rank them.
Schindler's List
1993 · Steven Spielberg
Psycho
Alfred Hitchcock
12 Angry Men
1957 · Sidney Lumet
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
1964 · Stanley Kubrick
Citizen Kane
1941 · Orson Welles
Casablanca
1942 · Michael Curtiz
The Lighthouse
2019 · Robert Eggers
It’s A Wonderful Life
1946 · Frank Capra
Raging Bull
1980 · Martin Scorsese
La Haine
1995 · Mathieu Kassovitz
Seven Samurai
1954 · Akira Kurosawa
Roma
2018 · Alfonso Cuarón
Search the frames behind these palettes
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Sign up for freeCommon questions
- How are these movie colour palettes calculated?
- Every frame in the FrameThrower library carries five extracted colours. For each film those samples are pooled, binned in RGB and averaged, and the six most common bins become its palette — with the share of sampled colour each one covers. Warmth, saturation and luminance are means over the same samples. 5277 films qualify, each with at least 12 frames and 50 colour samples.
- What does warmth mean here?
- How far a palette leans toward the red and orange half of the colour wheel, from −1 (fully cool) to +1 (fully warm), weighted by saturation so that grey pixels do not vote. Black-and-white films are excluded from warmth entirely — a monochrome image has no hue to lean either way, and including them would rank Casablanca among the warmest films ever shot.
- Can I use these hex values?
- Yes. The measurements — hex values, shares, warmth, saturation and luminance — are published under CC BY 4.0 with attribution to FrameThrower. That licence covers the measurements only. The film frames they were derived from are not ours to license; rights remain with their owners.
- Why are black-and-white films listed separately?
- Because hue says nothing about them. 475 films in the catalogue measure below 0.05 mean saturation, which is monochrome in practice. Their look is built from tonal range instead, so they are ranked on luminance and left out of every hue-based list.
More: the stills database · all films · cinematography techniques · measured film lists