TOO. DAMN. LONG.
Back in March I was watching THE BATMAN (2022) at a local cinema-eatery, thinking “where’s the check? They bring it 30 minutes before the end, right?” I wondered about the status of my bill about three times during the movie thinking that surely there wasn’t more than 30 minutes left, but there was…there always was. As you may have guessed, I had gone into the movie unaware that THE BATMAN, at 176 minutes, is just under 3 hours long.
I am not the first to point out that 3 hours is a long movie. Every time one of these BEN-HURs gets released, thinkpieces get written that are either about how movies are getting out-of-hand or how we should celebrate two and a half being the new normal. I think that when we need an app to tell us when the best time to sneak to the bathroom is, it’s time to bring back intermissions. (By the way, for THE BATMAN it’s during the car chase)
My annoyance at the length of THE BATMAN led to conversations about long movies in the past, and the axiom “If it needs two VHS tapes, it’s too long” was formed over bubble tea. That’s right:
THE SOUND OF MUSIC? Too long!
GONE WITH THE WIND? Too long!
LAWRENCE OF ARABIA? Too long!
TITANIC? I liked that movie, but it was on two VHS, so too long!
Why did they split films on VHS? Well, If you wanted to maintain the best quality, you were limited to two hours’ playtime on a standard tape, but not every film 121 minutes long got the double-pack treatment. It seems that a runtime of 160 minutes, or two hours and forty minutes, earned you the second tape. So ARMAGEDDON is safe, but AVENGERS: ENDGAME is far too long.
That answers the question of what’s too long, but are movies actually getting longer?
Sure, there’s your DARK KNIGHTs and IRISHMAN, but there have always been PRIVATE RYANs and MY FAIR LADYs. I saw a stat that claimed “2021's average runtime was 14 minutes longer than the average for 1991, and 21 minutes longer than the average runtime of the top-ten movies released in 1981.” Suggesting that perhaps the average run time is indeed creeping upwards. I decided to run my own simple analysis.
I took the Top 20 (by domestic gross) for each decade, as listed by film historian Tim Dirks, and ran some quick statistics. I can see how one may get the impression that films have been getting longer recently but when you go further back than the 80s…
It’s not so simple anymore. Perhaps we only think movies are getting longer because the 80s favored shorter films? I mean, that massive spike is a film from 1927, I don’t know how I’d sit through five and a half hours of a silent Napoleon. And by this metric, the 2010s dipped down compared to the 2000s.
Of course, this is only the top 20 of each decade, and average runtime is only one metric we could look at. It would be interesting to dig into a larger data set…but I have a film fest to prepare for!
If you agree that something short and sweet is what you need, check out the shorts programs at Under Worlds 2022, May 20th and 21st. Badges on sale now!
Did I make you nostalgic for VHS? Say hi to our friends at Austin VHS Swap.