If I look at one of the photography books in my shelf, they are even talking about 18 stops and such for some film material, and how this doesn't translate to paper and all the things that can be done to render it visible in print and how things behave at both extreme ends (towards black and white). Read: Tone-mapping (i.e. trimming down a high DR image to a lower DR output media) is really old.

The good thing about digital is that it can deal with color at decent tonal resolutions (if we assume 16 bits, not the limited 14 bit or even less) and in environments where film has technical limitations.