In movies with wide aspect ratio ? It seems more logical as it doesn't mess with the visuals here, and aesthetically it looks better to have them on a black background. I wonder why it's never done that way.

In my short movie I think I'll put them here and I'll see how it plays out.

have them on a black background

It's done that way quite often...but you knew that.

Pretty much all the subs I download put them inside the visuals of the movie.

Idk, did you watch Days of Heaven?

Yeah. It's in 1.85 aspect ratio so no black space for subs anyway.

I liked it slightly better than TTOL and Badlands, but that's it. The visuals were very beautiful. But it made me realize what is my problem with all Terrence Malick movies : they have no ideals that drive the story. The characters lack any sort of moral sense, they sometimes talk about it, but it's more as an afterthough, once the acts have already been done. Basically his movies present humans just as a part of nature, of the whole circle of life, what they do is never right or wrong, it just is, and for Malick it's beautiful because he loves nature. But I don't like that, I think humans shouldn't let nature dictate everything and instead should fight for what is right. Well that's the whole point of building a civilized world, right ? I see Malick as a guy who when something bad happens will just shrug and say "well that's the way of the world".

So yeah basically his movies are so close to nature itself that they become completely devoid of what makes us specifically human. We become just animals (which we are, but we are much more than that).

I've seen several movies that have that.

It's some kind of pretension. Non-English speaking countries generally don't even use subtitles, and favor dubs. Criterion loves to have white subtitles on black and white movies. Long sections of dialog even go completely untranslated sometimes. I hate when a movie has different scenes in different languages. It's like they're trying to tell you you're not worthy. Learn French, you barbarian!

Worst of the worse is b+w movies with white subs on white background.

If you watch movie with a program like XBMC, you can choose your subtitle location (I would guess some dvd player do the same).

It seem logical to put them there, but maybe because we are use to have them on the screen it seem more distracting to have them in the bottom blackbar sometime.

Your eye get father from the image and the contrast is really big.

I guess the reason would rather be the black bars being a feature of the playback equipment more than the movie proper (unless letterboxed, obviously). Which can't be easily predicted. The one thing that you may safely assume is that it should be able to display a full frame.

True, people can have a 2.35:1 tv or projector or 16:9 or 4:3, etc.. it is much safer for the 'by default' to be on the picture to be sure to be shown and have it as an option to put them at the bottom of the screen if the subtitle encoding make it available.

But still, when I have the option I don't always put them in the black bar.

Yeah. I've never looked into this to any meaningful detail, but with text subtitles I believe it's actually the player that decides where to put them. While (bitmapped) picture subtitles obviously have a dimension and quite probably also a location specification encoded. But - all depending on player support, obviously - I'd imagine that even those could be shifted around, considering that they're separate streams.

I assume you're referring to home video releases only.

They do that quite often.