You just can't replace film ...

[Osi Osgood]

We bought a 4K UHD TV and watched, for the first Blu-ray venture, the original Star Wars film. While I was struck by how much little details I saw that I never saw before (excessive wear on the droids, for instance), I was also struck by how inaccurate the colors were in some instances. The most glaring being Luke, Owen and Beru eating dinner. The faces are literally one dark brownish mess, with literally no color change to the skin tones in bright like or shadows. They were not realistic facial tones. Quite honestly, they're faces looked like the reddish soil outside of our Oklahoma home. I was curious, so I pulled out my First day run print of the Derann Star Wars feature. While there wasn't a heavy gradiation of colors, it was still there and best of all, they have the real skin tones of highly sun tanned farmers. The richness of color, in some instances, STILL, to this day, is better on film, even on this super 8 scope print! There is something to be said for these digital copies of film, but film still tops!

[David Strelitz]

With respect to your love of celluloid, I would have thought the colour variation would be more to do with the telecine. Your Blu-ray may even have been HD and upscaled. Way too many variables and that's assuming that the TV colour is set up correctly.
I always smile when I watch TV progs from the 70s and 80s shot on analogue and see how far we have come...alas not always the content.

[Ed Gordon]

Another possibility is that the Bluray is a 4k UHD disc. If that is the case, you will find a button on your Bluray player labeled "HDR Setting" which allows you to tweak the configuration for your equipment.

High-dynamic range (HDR) is a specification that determines whether a display can render an image that has deeper contrast, a wider color gamut, and generally better representation of brightness than that of a standard-dynamic range (SDR) display. This means that with content that supports HDR and a correctly calibrated display, you will often be able to spot more details in both brighter and darker scenes while also enjoying an image that can look slightly more saturated or color-accurate, depending on the implementation.

"Often" is an important distinction here, though, because good HDR production relies on two key factors: the display and the content. It is possible for a monitor to have an HDR specification but display HDR content poorly, while some HDR content can be badly implemented and end up looking worse than SDR (Red Dead Redemption 2 at launch on consoles was a good example of this).

Here are some frame grabs from my 2k Bluray of Star Wars. This is what it should look like:

[Osi Osgood]

That does look a good deal better than what we saw those few days earlier.