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.
If you look further back, I think you’ll see that films are just returning to a natural length of between 1.5 - 3h that hit an equilibrium by the 1970s. Films with niche appeal or marketed at young crowds maxed out at 90m in the 80s I think due to pressure from theatres and new home video and pay tv markets. A really marketable film needed to be 90m, short for many showings but still have enough room to sell ads when it an on tv at 2h broadcast length.
Many things have changed. Streaming content can be any length and divided however the creator chooses, provided they don’t want a theatrical run for awards purposes. Theatre business is way down, and the cost theatres pay is way up, but more than ever they rely on blockbusters so if an auteur like Reeves wants to do a 6h batman, as long as it sells tickets it’s fine.
The Godfather and Apocalypse Now were long movies that primarily made money from the box office because FFC could push back when studios looked to cut his films. They knew people would see his films because they were good. Today, Christopher Nolan or Jordan Peele have the kind of instant box office/streaming credibility to make long films again, and Hollywood is much more focused on extravagant showstopping spectacle than it was in the 80s and 90s when a lot of more dramatic story-driven films won awards and even made a lot of money, so you see more expensive blockbuster films with huge marketing being action films like marvel, dc, john wick. Some are still 90m, but up to 2h15m isn’t uncommon. I guess what I’m saying is, directors won the right to make long films in the 60s and 70s when people like Hitchcock and Kubrick showed that filmmakers that were artists could also make studios a lot of money. But, the 80s and the 90s cut down the appetite for those sorts of films both by the studios and the public. There were so many pressures that made studios balk at long runtimes. It’s not that people haven’t always had 3h films to make, it’s just that many of them ended up shot as 2h30m films, edited down to 90m for theatrical release, and then put out on DVD at 1h10m with deleted scenes in the extras. It was a wild time.
Apparently none of this got through to the creators of The Watchmen.
The TV show or the film? Zack Snyder’s The Watchmen clocks in at 2h42. His previous film, 300, 1h57m, and his debut, Dawn of the Dead (2004), 1h40m, so I would say he was definitely pushing the boundary of what the studio was willing to let him shoot and release, and the directors cut brings it to 3h. The Watchmen film is an adaptation, and it is already as long as it is. It’s possible to just calculate how long it would take actors to say every line of existing dialogue, and my guess is that it’s longer than the film was.
The movie. I’m pretty sure we saw the directors cut but also it could have been the regular theatrical release. All I remember is sitting there bored out of my mind and randomly being flashed by the blue thing.
I’m gonna have to be that guy and say the graphic novels were way better than that thing Snyder made. But part of why it’s long is it’s an entire series being condensed down into a single movie.