Movies have been getting longer for a few years or so but they are especially long this year. Look at the biggest films this year and see how they are about 20-30min longer than they would be in the past.
- The Flash - 2h 24m
- Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny - 2h 34m
- Oppenheimer - 3h
- Barbie - 1h 54m
- John Wick: Chapter 4 - 2h 49m
- Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 - 2h 29m
And even crazier are the 2 parter movies.
- Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse - 2h 16m
- Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One - 2h 43m
- Dune 2 - reported way over 2h
A few years ago this was different.
- Action films like Indiana Jones, Marvel movies, Joh Wick and Mission Impossible used to be about 2h - 2h 15m.
- Movies closest to Barbie like Clueless and Legally Blonde were about 1h 30m.
- Biopics like Oppenheimer were longer but not 3h. Lincoln was 2h 30m.
- Animated films would be 1h 45m max.
- Lynch’s original Dune was almost 3h cut by the studio to 2h 15m.
I remember when Harry Potter Deathly Hallows got criticism for being a 2 parter. The Dark Knight Rises got push back from theaters saying it was too long and made it difficult to have a lot of showtimes. Now it feels like these long showtimes and 2 parters are the rule rather than the exception.
Do you prefer movies longer or do you think they are getting too bloated and need to be cut down?
Also what is causing this trend of long films? I think it’s streaming and binging making people more comfortable watching TV for a long time. But I see people say that attention spans are getting shorter thanks to the internet so I don’t really know.
Personally I don’t think that’s the point at all. Even if there are multiple episodes of a show watched in the same day, there are 2 things missing from movies that make shows considerably more appealing.
The first is that with shows, you already know this is just buildup of more story, so if it’s slow or character development lags, as long as you are still into it, it’s fine, they have so much time to tell the story and develop everything fully. Movies, unless planned as multi-release franchises, rarely have this going for them. It has to engage you enough to want to slam down 2 hours of time upfront. Most movies fail spectacularly to build their characters enough for me to want to drop that sort of time on the nothingpotato predictable ending, but I’ll gladly do so with shows.
The second is flexibility. If you want to watch 4 episodes that are 30 min, you can, but you can also choose to stop after 2 if it isn’t holding your interest or you want to do something else. You can pause a movie that isn’t engaging you enough and come back later, but let’s be real, we all know how that turns out 85+% of the time…