HDR, especially in the movies industry, often gets the reputation of being unnecessary and only causing detriment.
Here we can debunk some of the most common claims.
Claim: HDR exclusively distract the viewer from the focus of the scene, by making background elements overly bright.
Answer: Thanks to the image below, we can make a fairly strong argument against it. The left one is SDR, while the right one is HDR. Notice how the SDR image actually appears brighter, due to the gradients clipping to white? Granted, this wouldn't often be the case in movies, as they have full control on every game, but for games, the argument very much stands.
It's possible to exclusively use the extra HDR headroom with nuance, making the image more natural.
Claim: The extra brightness and color gamut ranges are detrimental and they take away encoding space from shadow detail.
Answer: coming soon!