<<<-- Originally posted by Chris Coen : I would guess because of the surround sound mixing that's involved with movies. As your accustomed to hearing, dialogue comes out of the 'center' channel, while ambient and F/X are directed to other channels during the mixing process. The idea is to have your audio relative to the visual space being presented. Since most of your dialogue is coming from visual sources that are in the visual frame of the shot, it makes sense that you would also want the dialogue to project from that same source.

This is my best guess for this situation. -->>>

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Interesting explanation, that makes sense.
What about voice-over recording though? Where the sound isn't coming from the actor's mouth, but you see him visually. Any ideas on the best way to mix that?

I imagine the same would apply, except you would have to re-create the ambient sounds that would otherwise be produced by the rooms natural acoustics. If you recorded the voice-over in a 'dead' room on a mono track, I would add stereo reverb to simulate the rooms ambient acoustics on a seperate audio bus to recreate a suttle but effective audio track for the voices.

With reverb, a little goes a long way.

Just my thoughts of course.