Why it feels like movies are getting longer

[Bobby Henderson]

The article in Frank's opening post was pretty good, but I think they missed one big influence in why a greater number of movies are getting longer: competition with original content on streaming platforms.

There is no set time limit for how long an original, limited series needs to be on a streaming service or even a traditional cable TV network. The episodes can be 30 minutes, an hour or two hours. It doesn't matter. Over a decade has passed since binge watching and time shifting became very common. Internet connections fast enough to allow HD-quality streaming in real time was a big game changer.

In the past, physical media limits and time limits both affected movie run times very seriously. A VHS tape could hold only so much before a long movie spilled over to a second tape. DVDs and Blu-ray discs have only so much capacity. I remember seeing 35mm prints of movies like Titanic or Pearl Harbor that barely had any space at all left on a platter deck. A DTS CD-ROM maxes out at 100 minutes. An original 2-drive DTS-6 player couldn't play a movie longer than 3 hours and 20 minutes without an intermission.

Shows playing on streaming platforms have none of these physical limitations. Viewers can watch these shows in one very long sitting or break it up in various smaller bits, like one does when reading a novel.

I think movie studios are keeping some of this in mind. The amount of time their product spends playing in commercial theaters is shorter than ever. Retail sales of movies on Blu-ray or digital download have been tanking. In the end many viewers will be watching that theatrical content via some premium cable or streaming platform. Modern d-cinema setups aren't affected by capacity limits the way a film-based rig can be. So they can at least run a 3+ hour movie without much of a problem, other than being limited to fewer shows per day.

There's little reason why a movie should last beyond 90 to 120 min. Once in a while, there might be an epic like Gone With the Wind that actually takes so long to tell a story. In GWTW, I would assume that the film adaptation would have to follow the novel fairly closely. No? Regardless, that's what I think most people expect.

It really depends on the kind of movie. Honestly, the biggest problem by far with traditional "2 hour" Hollywood movies is not the growing run times, but rather the Save the Cat! template bullshit being applied to so many of them. A great deal of content on premium cable and streaming services is far less bound to that very predictable nonsense. The cable/streaming content is also not as affected by what the MPAA can do with sticking a NC-17 vs R rating on something. Add to that the fact the TV shows and theatrical movies are all using the same camera systems (and anamorphic lenses), production methods and post production methods. Maybe if the major movie distributors took more chances on more creative product they might be able to get audiences into theaters with more than just super hero movies.

Wow, plenty means three whole movies. Why not throw in Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet, which I believe is the current record holder for commercially released (sorry Empire State) English language films at 4hr 2mins?

There are longer films. One example is Gettysburg (1993). That one ran 4 hours and 31 minutes. It even had some 70mm blow-up prints back then.

I would suggest that if someone under 60 can't go three hours without needing to use the bathroom, they need to see a doctor, although if you're sitting there drinking 32 ounces of sugar poison, I can understand why someone would have to go.

Add in the possibility of the viewer eating dinner and drinking beverages before the show. I can sit through a 3 hour movie without running to the bathroom if I plan a strategy ahead and maybe not get anything to drink from the snack counter. I prefer diet soft drinks (high fructose corn syrup is just as artificial a sweetner as Splenda, aspartame, etc). But diet soda go through your system quick as anything. Beer seems to go through faster!

[Martin McCaffery]

Variety weighs in:
https://variety.com/2022/film/featur...es-1235187797/

Why Are Movies So Long Now?

Rebecca Rubin
Brian Stauffer for Variety


Did a chill go down your spine when you noticed Robert Pattinson’s “The Batman” was just shy of three hours long?

Maybe you feel, along with other comic book enthusiasts, there’s no such thing as too much Bruce Wayne. Three hours? Five hours? Inject it directly into your eyeballs.

Or, after two years of pandemic isolation, perhaps you’ve gotten so used to pausing the TV every 30 seconds to check your phone, grab a snack, use the restroom or doom-scroll on Twitter. The thought of spending 180 uninterrupted minutes staring at a silver screen is so daunting, you’ve considered skipping “The Batman” altogether.

Moviemakers take all those reactions into consideration when they deliver their final cut. A-list actors in leading roles, a big-name director and a compelling pitch are key in selling a film, of course. But a movie’s running time is one of the less flashy yet deliberately thought-out elements. Unlike precisely timed network television shows, movies have flexibility. But there are good reasons why studios and directors want to avoid bloat — though in some instances, it’s unavoidable.

A movie’s length has the potential to impact budget, profits and word of mouth. With millions of dollars on the line, those precious minutes are never arbitrary. In an age when there’s no shortage of entertainment options, directors, producers or executives don’t need anyone to exit a movie and think: “It was good, but it was way too long.”

It may not be scientifically proven, but sometimes it feels like movies are, indeed, getting longer. Many of this year’s biggest releases — “No Time to Die” (2 hours, 43 minutes), “Spider-Man: No Way Home” (2 hours, 28 minutes), “Dune” (2 hours, 35 minutes), “Eternals” (2 hours, 37 minutes) and “The Last Duel” (2 hours, 32 minutes) — may as well have run forever and a day.
Robert Pattinson toplines “The Batman,” which clocks in at 2 hours and 55 minutes. Courtesy of Jonathan Olley/Warner Bros.

Still, it’s a trend that’s not necessarily new. Plenty of older popular movies — 1939’s “Gone With the Wind” (3 hours, 58 minutes), 1962’s “Lawrence of Arabia” (3 hours, 47 minutes) and 1959’s “Ben-Hur” (3 hours, 32 minutes) — managed to become commercial smashes despite butt-numbing running times. Ditto recent hits like “Spider-Man” and “No Time to Die.” Those examples prove there’s not always a negative correlation between the length of a movie and its success. Most of the highest-grossing films in history fall between two and three hours. And only one Oscar best picture winner, “Annie Hall,” comes in at just about 1 hour and 30 minutes.

Streaming services don’t face the same financial pressure as traditional studios, so they don’t require such rigid guidelines. Since Netflix allows the freedom for Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman” to be three and a half hours, Zack Snyder’s “Army of the Dead” to be 2 hours and 28 minutes or Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods” to be 2 hours and 34 minutes, it’s harder for the old guard to impose strict limits on filmmakers.

Whether it’s for theaters or streamers, there’s still a healthy mix of art and empiricism that goes into the long-standing debate over an individual movie’s running time. But is this a new hot topic or has the battle of the bulge been as long as movie history?

Let’s, as Julie Andrews sang in “The Sound of Music” (2 hours, 54 minutes), start at the very beginning.

In the early days of cinema, the duration of a movie directly correlated to the amount of film that was available. That’s the reason in the first decade of the 20th century, most flicks would range from 10 to 15 minutes. By the 1920s, technology had advanced enough to accommodate feature-length films, and by the 1950s, running times for epics, like “Gone With the Wind” or “The Ten Commandments,” became a selling point, one that studios used to great effect to compete with television. Audiences could watch any old show at home, but only cinemas offer the kind of immersive storytelling worth leaving the couch and parting with hard-earned cash.

The deployment of digital cinema in the late ’90s also allowed running times to vary. It freed filmmakers from the physical limitations of cumbersome film reels. And computerized versions of movies meant three-hour features didn’t cost as much to ship and store.

“Most long films could be promoted as special and prestigious,” says Dana Polan, a cinema studies professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. “There was an assumption that length equaled quality.”

But, as Spider-Man might have put it had he run a film studio, with greater run times come greater responsibility — the lengthier a movie gets, the more that anyone with money on the line stands to worry. At the box office, longer movies mean fewer showtimes per day. Fewer showtimes reduce ticket sales. That makes it harder to break even and eventually turn a profit. At the same time, audiences have started to favor special-effects-driven movies, which usually come with bigger price tags and require higher returns to justify those increased costs.

Polan says he’s recently noticed mega-budgeted superhero and adventure tentpoles, which have come to all but sustain the exhibition industry, often incorporate long, CGI-heavy action scenes. Some sequences may even feel gratuitous.

“It’s almost to say, we’ve spent the money — let’s flaunt it,” he notes.

For most theatrical films, length contributes to the scheduling game. Theaters budget roughly three hours per screening to accommodate time for trailers beforehand and janitors to clean up after patrons. For a three-hour movie like “Avengers: Endgame” or the upcoming “The Batman,” exhibitors need to account for an additional hour, which cuts at least one daily showtime. With “Endgame,” multiplexes stayed open for 72 hours straight to meet sky-high demand, but not every blockbuster hopeful gets that red-carpet treatment.
“Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” with Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint, had kids sprinting back from restrooms during its more than two-and-a-half-hour run time. ©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett C

Running time can also affect downstream revenues, like television licensing. For a while, 91 minutes was the ideal length — it fit nicely in a two-hour block on cable with commercials.

Those are only the concerns for a finalized film. When directors initially sign on to a major studio movie, they have a contractual obligation to deliver it at two hours. It’s almost unspoken that nobody pays attention to the rule, but it protects studios should a filmmaker deliver a movie with a truly egregious length.

“You sign it, and then you ignore it,” says Jon Turteltaub, the director of Nicolas Cage’s action-adventure series “National Treasure” and the Jason Statham-led shark epic “The Meg.” “Everyone from top to bottom wants the best film possible.”

Studios don’t want to pull the contract card because it could be seen as interfering with the creative process. But they prefer shorter films.

“Studios don’t enforce it, and producers don’t either, because they’ll eventually get it to the right length,” says Jonathan Glickman, a producer and former MGM Motion Picture Group president.

A shorter movie is less expensive to put together and therefore less of a financial risk. Such considerations start with the earliest physical part of a movie idea: the screenplay. A longer script requires more time to film. In turn, additional shooting dates tack on millions of dollars. With a visual-effects-driven film, an extra 30 to 60 more minutes of screen time can increase a budget by as much as 25%, one source at a major studio estimates. The more footage on tape, the more time is needed in post-production stages, which adds some $50,000 to $100,000 per week, the insider adds. That takes into account aspects like audio mixing and sound editing. It also requires more days to have actors on set. During the pandemic, longer filming schedules means a greater risk of having a COVID-19 outbreak delay production. Overall, trimming any excess before cameras begin rolling can be a difference of tens of millions of dollars.

“These battles exist from the moment you begin your movie,” says Turteltaub.

There’s a phrase in writing that refers to cutting favorite digressions in favor of a tighter narrative — kill your darlings.

The one surefire way to get directors in a murderous spirit: test screenings. Once a movie is in a malleable place, select audiences get to watch it early. According to experts in the craft of audience research, critiques usually come down to three points: pace (does the movie drag?), ending (can it stick the landing?) and general confusion about the plot (the villain is doing … what?).

Removing the fat is easy. Turteltaub says the first cut of “National Treasure,” including everything but the kitchen sink, was 3 hours and 45 minutes. “There’s always a ton of bad,” he says. “It’s getting rid of the good for a better good.” The final product clocked in at 2 hours and 11 minutes.

For the sequel, he estimates 40 minutes were lifted out of a more complete version of the movie. “That’s a big chunk. As the filmmaker, you’re sure you need all that to tell your story. You know there’s one actor who was only in that 40 minutes, and you need to call them,” Turteltaub says.

Test screenings can also work in a filmmaker’s favor. After enthusiastic previews, Chris Columbus, who directed “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” says Warner Bros. did not give him any pushback about the film’s sprawling 2-hour-and-32-minute running time. Making a kid sit for that long is usually a tall order. The adventures of the famous boy wizard proved an exception. Harry Potter is one of several big properties, including Marvel and James Bond, where running time doesn’t play a factor. For rabid fans, longer can sometimes mean better.
1939’s “Gone With the Wind,” starring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, approached the four-hour mark.Everett Collection / Everett Col

“We did the focus group, and all the parents said the film is too long, and all the kids said it’s too short. … I knew it was working when I saw kids sprinting to the bathroom and sprinting back because they didn’t want to miss anything,” Columbus recalls.

Kevin Goetz, a veteran movie researcher, says filmmakers, producers and studios take comments like “It’s too long” quite seriously. Experts have come to understand the complaint is a Rorschach test of sorts. It can mean many things. Is it boring? Too repetitive? Does the plot take forever to get going? Does the middle drag? Do audiences feel it’ll never end? There’s a delicate way to balance any disagreements between involved parties, he adds.

A handful of directors, like Christopher Nolan and Steven Spielberg, have final-cut privileges, which is the ability to determine the version of a movie that plays in theaters. And, Goetz says, even those heavyweights take feedback into account.

“All the greats I work with absolutely listen to audiences,” says Goetz, who wrote the book “Audience-ology: How Moviegoers Shape the Films We Love.”

So then why, after all this careful consideration at every step of the filmmaking process, does it still feel taxing to watch some movies? It’s not for lack of trying. Many executives blame it on the rush to meet a release date; there’s less time to make surgical edits that would prevent moviegoers from dozing off. In certain instances, directors can make the final decision to preserve scenes that others may view as indulgent. And once editing is already significantly underway, it’s easier and less expensive, for better or worse, to keep it all on screen.

At the end of the day, making movies isn’t an exact science. There’s no formula that determines how long it will take to tell a compelling story or to know with any certainty the exact moment that an audience member will start to get bored. But there are a few important rules of thumb.

“No movie is good because it’s long, and no movie is good because it’s short,” Turteltaub says. “But I’d rather see a short, shitty movie than a long one.”

[Randy Stankey]

Years ago, I saw an interview with Gene Wilder, talking about the making of "Young Frankenstein." He told a story about how Mel Brooks wanted to cut out a certain scene that had already been filmed. (If memory serves, it was the scene where they did the "Said-A-Give" bit.)

Brooks said to cut it out and went on about how corny and terrible the jokes were. Wilder replied, defending the jokes and told Brooks why he wanted to keep them in. Then, Brooks flipped and said the scene was good and to keep the scene the way it was.

When Wilder asked, if Brooks liked the scene the way it was, why did he go to such lengths to get an explanation?

As the story was told, Brooks replied, "I wanted to see if you'd argue for your work. I knew it was good because you stood up for yourself."

We need more producers and directors like Brooks and Wilder!

We also need a good, "Nothing Sacred - No Holds Barred" comedy movie, right now, too!

[Mike Blakesley]

That's one of my favorite scenes in Young Frankenstein. When Wilder says "No matter what I say, do NOT open this door!" you just know that he's going to panic and beg to have the door opened. So you know what's going to happen; the anticipation is almost as fun as the actual scene when he finally says "get me the hell out of here!"

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

The ones I've watched lately average two and a half hours.....

[Marcel Birgelen]

I recently watched the latest iteration of Spiderman and boy, that one did drag on... Maybe, it's because I'm getting older and have therefore had my fair share of hurtful experiences in life, but I'm getting tired of all the fake, predictable melodrama in modern movies.

Maybe it's also because I'm getting older, I'm apparently missing what makes modern movie heroes relatable and likeable, because I really couldn't care less if all of them died in an instant...

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

This thread should really be called "Long Posts About Long Movies"...

[Randy Stankey]

Two main reasons...

First, as I said, old-school writers, directors and producers put a lot of thought into what scenes to put in a movie, cut out or even just not film, to begin with.

I spoke, at length, with my girfriend's dad, just on this subject. I asked him about certain movie clichés and tropes and why they were used so often.
Often, they were just that. Clichés. Just as often, however, they were done in the name of time compression or to just simplify the plot.

For instance, consider the scene where a couple of cops are hanging out at the police station when the Chief hands them a hot tip and tells them to go investigate.
You, the hypothetical movie maker, could show the characters walk out the door, get into the car and drive to the scene of the crime or you could just show them saying, "Let's go!" then cut to the next scene where they are talking to a victim at the scene. Which is better? It depends on what you are trying to show.

Does that scene where the two cops are in the police cruiser, chatting about their wives and kids ACTUALLY add to the plot of the movie? If it doesn't, cut it out!

Hitchcock was famous for saying, "If something doesn't advance the plot of a movie, cut it out!"

The second reason is that people, nowadays, too often write for "fan service."
They watch the internet to see what people are saying about movies and shows. They hold focus groups. They try to please every last market demographic and pander to the most basic urges.

Why was Jerry Ryan cast as "Seven of Nine" in Star Trek: Voyager? Sex appeal, in order to lure in the teenage boys to watch more.
Was 7/9 a good character? Kind of. Ryan was a good actor and played the part well. She certainly looked good on screen.
But, would the show have been worse off without her? Nobody would have noticed, probably... except for those teenage boys who liked to slobber on the TV screen every time she made an appearance.

I made a comment to my girlfriend's dad while asking him about making movies. I asked him about why he thought they did something in a TV show and he basically said that it was fan service or something like that. I jokingly said, "Oh? Because it did well with the focus groups?" He gut laughed!

Do you remember the movie "Real Genius?" (With Val Kilmer.)
There was a scene at the professor's house where Kilmer made a comment, "I can hammer a nail with my penis."
Her dad HATED that line and he insisted that it be cut out! They sneaked it in, anyway, when he wasn't looking. He was highly pissed off when he found out!

Things like that are among the main reasons, he told me, why he retired from making movies.