Why do movies and shows need subtitles?

Have you ever watched a show or movie, and then a character delivers a line so unintelligible you have to scramble to find the remote and rewind? For me, this moment came during the climax of the Pete Davidson movie The King of Staten Islandwhere his main line was impossible to understand.

I had to rewind three times – and finally turn on subtitles – to finally pick up what he said.

This experience is not unique. Get enough people together and you can generally divide them into two categories: people who use subtitles and people who don’t. And according to a not-so-scientific YouTube poll we conducted on our Community tab, the last category is an endangered species — of those respondents who aren’t deaf or hard of hearing, 57 percent said they use closed captions, while only 12 percent said they generally don’t.

But why do so many of us feel we need it subtitles to understand the dialogue in the things we watch?

The answer to that question is complex – and we’ll get right to the bottom of it in this explainer, with the help of dialogue editor Austin Olivia Kendrick.

You can find this video and everything cafemadrid videos on YouTube.