I thought we were in an age of time-efficiency. Everything is getting shorter and faster.
Everything, except for Hollywood movies.
For the sake of short attention spans, Major League Baseball implemented several rules this year, including a time clock, to try to cut game-lengths down.
The result? After averaging a whopping 3+ hours/game for the last decade — including a record average of 3 hours, 11 minutes in 2021 — MLB has cut game-times down to just over two-and-a-half hours.
That’s still long, but slashing 40 minutes on average is remarkable.
Why did they do this? TikTok, shorter attention spans, more competition from other endless entertainment sources, and maybe more.
The average person — you and I — doesn’t have enough time in the day to dedicate to one thing for a long time.
There are just too many things that take up entertainment time.
Okay, but movies are a weird exception. They are definitely increasing in running time. Certainly the major blockbusters are. Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” is around 182 minutes. “The Matrix 4” was an absurd 158 minutes. John Wick 4 was 170 minutes, allowing it to pack more handgun shots to the head into the film.
I could keep going. I’ve seen this play out over the last 10 years or so, as I’ve gone to movies that are just longer and longer without needing to be. 135 minutes is standard for even lesser fare. “Sound of Freedom” was 131 minutes, and in most eras of movie history, it would’ve been no more than 110.
And just look at Marvel. Disney almost never puts out a Marvel movie that is efficient. They are all going to be 150 minutes at least, if not three hours for some of them.
I suspect their algorithms are telling them to do this, based on recent movie history and maybe all of movie history. Avengers: Endgame made an absurd amount of money with a 181-minute runtime. Looking back, so did Titanic, as a whopping 195 minutes.
Gone with the Wind is one of the greatest bladder-testers of all, at 212 minutes, up there with Lawrence of Arabia.
Yes, I suspect the algorithms. A “great” movie that makes big bucks is supposed to be long, longer than average at least. The top grossers from 2023 are mostly 150 minutes plus.
And that’s where I think we are with movie lengths.
If a movie is short, 100 minutes or less, it might not be good — so common-sense thinking goes — unless it’s a horror movie.
By contrast, if it’s long, the movie’s quality might be The Godfather, parts 1 and 2. Or. better for the studios, the kind of money-maker that Avengers: Endgame is.
All this means — and I am speculating based on a few first principles I believe in — is that the runtimes are signaling that movies are calculated commercial products. The longer it is now, the more money the studio hopes to make from it.
Moreover, consumers have bought into this by attaching a non-sequitur belief about movies, which is really helping studios out. Consumers tend to see the runtime as a *status signal* about the movie’s worth, now more than ever. (This is my most important insight here, I think.)
Movies have always been calculated commercial products, with runtimes contracting and expanding based on how movies were watched and what audience needs were. Back in the ‘10s, I mean the 1910s, you could see three-hour plus movies, which rivaled and simulated higher-art entertainment rivals of the theater and the opera.
In the 1950s, the gigantic blockbusters and sweeping historical epics just had to be three-plus hours long. Many big ones won major awards and audience hearts: the 1959 Ben-Hur’s runtime is 209 minutes, for example.
So it is today, even though the average movie-goer enjoys watching several dozen or hundred TikTok videos a day that range from a minute to five seconds in length.
Strangely, these same viewers give weight to a longer movie. If any Spiderman movie clocked in at 95-minutes, that would be a sign — an erroneous sign of course — that it sucked. I suspect that’s why first “Venom” didn’t get much traction. Had they made “Venom” to be 130 minutes, instead of the 90-minutes it is, I have faith that it would have many fanboy believers.
I would think that studios would want to make movies shorter for certain business reasons, and for most of movie history, they have aggressively sought to cut movies down in runtime. Disaster stories abound of how many a directorial vision was axed by a studio executive.
You could understand their business strategy for cutting down runtimes, though. The shorter a movie is, the more it can play during a 24-hour day. You can get several screenings out of a 90-minutes movie in a day at any given theater. But a 180-minute Marvel movie? That’s half as many screenings per screen, per day.
The studios solved this problem, though: they force theaters to play their blockbuster releases on multiple screens at once. At your local theater, Avengers:Endgame likely played on three screens at least, if it’s a multiplex, and one in 3D. Anything like it will play on at least two screens, if not four, and this is all mandated by the major studios.
And because the number-of-screenings-per-day problem was solved, with the blockbuster franchise-fare now eating up many theater screens at once, Avengers and Spiderman can be as long as anybody wants them to be.
Again, runtimes have become status-signals. For whatever reason, moviegoers believe longer movies must be better because they are longer. This is the same point I also make about movie ratings, which are not necessarily descriptions of content but prescriptions of how cool and edgy a movie is. If a blockbuster is PG, it must suck or be only for kids, so goes the thinking of the mass public.
The same now goes for runtimes: “if it’s a long movie, maybe it’s actually good! But 90 minutes? That’s either a kids’ movie or it’s terrible.”
Therefore, the G-rating and the 90-minute movie are near-dead.
I must now say the obvious: runtimes have nothing to do with quality. As the Mozart character says in “Amadeus,” and I’m paraphrasing, good music needs as many notes as it needs, no more and no less.
Similarly, a good movie needs as many frames at it needs, no more and no less, and if that’s 20 minutes or 20 hours, great.
If you pay attention to what’s coming out, you’ll notice that most of them need fewer frames. What would the 170-minute John Wick 4 have been like had it been the same length as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which was just 133 minutes? Maybe better? I think so.
The bonus in all of this is that I used to think a 133-minute movie was long. Nowadays, it seems normal. (I always go for shorter classic movies because it’s so much easier to fit 100 minutes into my schedule than 150 minutes.)
A couple of months ago, I was surprised to see “Return of the Jedi” was just that length, 133 minutes. I had thought it was much longer. Well, my memory is correct sort of: the movie is long for its time, which was 1983.
Compared to today’s blockbusters, it’s obviously on the shorter side.
How long would “Return of the Jedi” have been had it been released today?
I think the answer is: however long the algorithms say it should be, which is going to be no less than two-and-half-hours. Probably three hours, which is what they gave Nolan for Oppenheimer.
Bladders of the world, prepare yourselves!
The worst part of this is, they are still tacking 30+ minutes of previews before every single movie, at least where I live. The Batman was 3 hours long, plus a half hour of previews. Oppenheimer was the same, at least at my theater, which is a chain. I do enjoy previews, but these companies need to realize that YouTube exists, and some of us have to get up early for work in the morning. Combined with the fact that trailers these days tend to spoil most of the plot, it’s just not worth it.
Even when I deliberately show up late to a movie, which I’ve made a habit of now that I can get away with it since they introduced assigned seating, that still means getting home later, which is a big deal since my nearest theater is a half hour drive.
I wonder if people are also more willing to spend more time at longer movies due to costs? These days it’s a cold $20 for a standard ticket where I live, plus gas, and forget about popcorn unless you’re sneaking your own snacks inside (I yearn for the days when I lived in the Midwest and could catch a matinee for five bucks!). Maybe people just figure a longer movie is a better return on the price? Affordability must be a factor, especially for families.
It’s really a shame we’ve lost the 90 minute G movie. I recently went to anniversary screenings of Return of the Jedi and Jurassic Park, both just barely 2 hours long. I enjoyed both better than any recent blockbusters. That’s about all my bladder can handle anyways.