[kridsdale3]

Last night I watched Erin Brokovitch (2000) and it was like looking at film that had been partially sepia-processed with the heavy handedness of the grading.

The Matrix was a year before that, but they had a narrative reason to use grading, and did so quite well.

[WorldMaker]

The Matrix also had a technical reason/glitch that pushed them earlier in the process to pursue the narrative reason. (Per some of the commentary, the early effects work they were doing, such as processing the first versions of "bullet time", were very susceptible to green/blue screen leakage so they leaned into that, and used it to decide which shots should use green or blue screens and let that leakage drive other parts of the color grading, including introduce "fake" color leaks onto set work that didn't use chroma keying [green/blue screens].)