I got to wondering about this when I was watching The Terminator (1984) recently. This is one of my all-time favorite movies, and I think has some of the most beautiful and iconic night scenes in any film, accentuated by the mercury vapor streetlights on the streets of Los Angeles at the time. However, I noticed recently in the opening scene of the movie where Arnold Schwarzenegger stares over the edge of Griffith's Observatory at the city below, you see what appear to be a combination of MV and HPS streetlights. I remember reading that LA began replacing MV with HPS in the 1970s, so this makes sense. Yet all of the streets that the film is shot in are clearly almost entirely lit by MV. I seem to remember other 80s and 90s movies that have mostly MV lights, and I remember that whitish-blue lighting in a lot of newer movies, too. This got me wondering, did filmmakers prefer MV over other HID lights, particularly in the early days of HPS? If so, did the better CRI of frosted MV over HPS have something to do with it? I haven't read anywhere that they intentionally shot the film on streets lit by MV, but I wouldn't be surprised; James Cameron is known to make attention-to-detail decisions like that.

The scene I was referring to is here; starts at 1:08: https://youtu.be/UjpBs2BfNbw?si=16da520OiTKyjyxv

In many of the John Wick scenes, mostly outdoor fighting scenes, they appear to be lit by MV, but it is probably just a filter. The higher CRI probably helps, and the color probably gives things a more intense, evil, or scary look.

Interesting. I've also noticed that a lot of the lighting filmmakers use seems to produce a color similar to MV.

I've also noticed this, especially for scenes looking down long roads.

Nothing you see in movies actually is the color the eye would see when you were there, right in the action. Everything gets color corrected, regardless of whether it's digital or analog. But especially these days, it is highly likely that the yellow HPS light would selectively be color corrected to something more fitting the movie's atmosphere, since with modern editing tech that's just much easier and more perfected.

Shooting movies with HPS light is and making them look good is very hard, so they might call for just selecting the exact HPS color and turning it a desaturated green to fit an urban dystopia kind of look. The greenish MV look fits urban scenes and 'Neon Underground' much better than the golden yellow of HPS.

It also depends on where they were shot. In the USA, it seems that MV street lighting was the standard for a long time. However, i grew up with LPS and HPS with fluorescents mixed in in residential streets. Amsterdam is still about 50% HPS so any night movie shot in the last 35 years should in theory be either neutral (when it's a street lit with fluorescents, usually 3000k) or golden yellow (HPS). I have never seen mercury vapor public street lighting, only on parking lots etc.

But i'm sure that if you're gonna look for it, you'll find scenes shot under HPS light that actually look the part. For instance - this is a random shot from Drive (2011).