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, John 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.
Data:
https://imgur.com/dXYUwdh
One thing people probably aren’t considering is tapes. They had a literal length to them. I remember Titanic was a 2 tape set because it was so long. That meant, movies wanted to meaningfully hit the home market, they had to be short enough to fit on one tape, including any preroll advertisements the studio wanted the squeeze in.
DVDs helped a little, but they took were constrained, and were trying to pack in additional features while they were at it.
Now all bets are off in the home market. Even TV shows have started changing to match the format. Streaming first shows are often variable length per episode. Rather than try to fit a specific size, they run until the story is told, like a movie.
This is an interesting graph! I think the phenomenon of longer runtimes has two major reasons:
1. Streaming Studios are much less stringent with how long a movie can be since it’s less of a concern how many times it can be shown per day/theatre. Also, runtime doesn’t matter as much when the viewers can pause and return to it whenever they please. This is encouraged by streaming services because it also increases the overall time spent in the app.
2. The vanishing of medium-budget movies High-profile, high-budget movies by known directors have always been longer on average, because they can afford to do so and are expected to draw large audiences. In recent years the number of mid-budget movies, the likes we are used to from pre-2010, has drastically decreased in favor of big blockbuster productions (here’s an article about it). So the average runtime has increased as a consequence of this.
I personally don’t like this trend. Although I really enjoy longer movies, most of them wind up with obnoxious amounts of badly written filler-content.
That peak in the early 2000s has to be the extended LOTR trilogy. Which I’m very happy to watch
From the data, it looks like average lengths have gone down since about 2004, so this year may just be an anomaly.