Welcome to the forums.
I don't see "better" colors in your pictures. I see different colors. Evidently you prefer the more saturated colors that VLC is showing.
VLC uses its own internal filters to render. I don't know what it's doing, or how you may have configured it.
I tested on my system, and by default, VLC produces exactly the same colors as MC does (in both MC video modes) for SDR content (HDR content is a whole different thing). So I suspect you have something tweaked differently. In VLC, check Tools->Effects & Filters->Video Effects.
Another thing to consider is if you are outputting to a TV, and MC is changing the video mode to a different frame rate (like 23.976fps for movies) which MC is probably not, then your TV will detect that, and might apply different processing. In this scenario, if you played from both programs at the same resolution and framerate, your TV could not tell the difference and the color processing it applied would be the same.
With MC, you have two ways to adjust color more to your liking:
1. If you are using Red October Standard as your Video Mode in Options->Video, then you can right-click on a video during playback, and select "Color Controls" from the right-click menu to play with the settings. Whether this works or not supposedly depends on the default video renderer on your system. These controls do not work for me. If it doesn't work, see option 2:
2. If you are using Red October HQ as your video mode, this invokes the MadVR video renderer, and you can learn how to use the MadVR color controls:
https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1709584https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/MadVR_Expert_GuideHave fun...