In the time it takes to watch Martin Scorsese’s latest crime epic, Killers of the Flower Moon, a person could fly from NYC to Miami, run a (quick) marathon, or even undergo a lumbar spinal fusion – essentially, a wielding of the vertebrae that constitutes a major surgery. None of those activities sound as watching the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert de Niro con and kill a path to becoming 1920s oil barons over the course of nearly three and a half hours (especially now that it’s on VOD), but the fact that they all last roughly the same amount of time is telling.
Scorsese is, of course, a director known for favoring longer runtimes, but he’s not the only filmmaker testing the bladder control of audiences. Masters like Ridley Scott, Quentin Tarantino, Christopher Nolan, and James Cameron are reliably (and often effectively) verbose. And in the past two years, award-winning and critically adored films like Elvis, Oppenheimer, Babylon, Avatar: The Way Of Water, and Tar all ran for close to or longer than, three hours, doing their part to keep driving this northward trend.
According to What to Watch, the average runtime of the top ten movies by decade has been slowly creeping up from a brisk 110 minutes in the 80s to 126 minutes in the early 2000s to a back-aching 141 minutes in 2022 — a 21 percent jump. It’s not your imagination, your social media dependence, or our collectively shrinking attention spans: movies are getting longer. Critics and film fans aren’t the only ones noticing either.
In a fascinating Vanity Fair investigative piece from earlier this year, writer Natalie Jarvey found that plenty of producers and executives agree that movie length is becoming an issue on the production and marketing sides. But, the studios and streamers they represent are in crisis mode at the moment, scrambling to justify rising subscription prices and ticket costs to court would-be fans. They’re starting to believe that hours-long epics are their key to remaining relevant and, in their misguided panic, they’re prioritizing spectacle over everything else.
Much has been said about studios and streamers chasing the franchise formula made popular (and profitable) by Marvel and, to a lesser extent, DC. Everything is clawing to earn that “event movie” label in order to stand out from the glut of comic book team-ups and TV binge-watches. It’s created a box office bottleneck that’s all but killed the concept of variety when it comes to movie-going.
“There used to just be a lot more balance,” Erik Anderson, founder and editor-in-chief of the website AwardsWatch, told CNN in 2022. “You go look at the top 10 films of any given year going back to the ’90s, ‘80s, ‘70s, and it was a mix of everything: action and science fiction and drama and comedies. What we see now is just Marvel, Marvel, Marvel, [DC Extended Universe], ‘Dune’ – these other existing IPs rather than original content.”
To compete, streamers are courting big-name directors and promising them unprecedented freedom. Most of the time, that manifests in minutes.
But why are filmmakers like Scorsese and Scott subscribing to this new motto of “bigger is better?” And what does it say about the state of filmmaking that those worthy of final cut approval and hours-long odysseys are so homogenous, that the films we’re getting are limited to overlong crime sagas, historical biopics, and CGI-bogged sequels that demand hours upon hours of movie-goers’ time?
Scorsese can craft a two-hour crime classic that hums like no one else – see Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, and Raging Bull for proof. Killers three-hour-plus runtime not only obliterates the final cuts of these films, but it also gets lost in its own weeds a bit by taking on the entirety of its source material, teetering between a crime thriller, a police procedural, and a more interesting character study of Lily Gladstone’s protagonist, Mollie Burkhart. And it’s not just Scorsese’s opus that struggles to confine itself to a more bearable runtime. Damien Chazelle’s gorgeously shot three-hour Babylon flop, Scott’s deliciously fun two-plus hour chronicle of the fall of the house of Gucci, Nolan’s fascinating three-hour history lesson about the man who drive The Manhattan Project, Cameron’s mesmerizing CGI-saturated sequel to Avatar — they all took hits for dragging in different acts.
And, like Scorsese, all of these directors have proven capable of doing more with less – time that is. Who remembers Whiplash? Blade Runner? Alien? Memento, Batman Begins, Terminator? Most of these films were under two hours but none approached the length these guys are now flirting with in each new project they announce. Perhaps it’s a way to wrestle back control of an industry and a broken system that’s prioritized the instant gratification of franchise fare over everything else for far too long.
Scorsese has made no secret of his distaste for comic book movies. By making three-hour dramas tailored to discerning adults, is he proving cinema should not be limited to spandex and multiverses? Cameron has griped that audiences are willing to binge hours of a TV show but balk at a film measuring the same amount of time. That type of “blitz viewing” isn’t really comparable as so many of these directors are asking fans to trek to theaters instead of streaming at home, but as studios continue to try to court audiences away from their couches, is it a hill Cameron and others are willing to bury their self-control under?
And is all of this added time really serving moviegoers?
After all, studies have shown that most people have an average attention span of just 90 minutes. That’s not a consequence of smartphones or social media, it’s just science, and it’s reflective of audience preference when it comes to theater trips. In a 2021 survey for the LA Times, 36% of respondents “said they often sought out a film’s runtime before deciding to see it.” Of that number, 57% “expressed trepidation about movies running past 150 minutes.”
Yet, here we are, with over a dozen of the year’s most notable films teasing anxieties around that 150-minute mark. Almost all are made by men, most trade on existing IP or history, and too few feature protagonists of color. While some of these movies have found breakout success at the box office, more still haven’t made a dent big enough to justify their “event viewing” bloat, despite being helmed by prolific directors, sporting star-studded casts, and boasting fascinating subject material. These movies aren’t categorically bad, just the opposite. Films like Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon are rich, engrossing awards contenders that deserve to be seen, but are their runtimes working against that objective?
As this is a piece debating the value and prolificacy of longer films, now is about the time Roger Ebert’s definitive stance on the subject would be wielded to argue against the correlation between more minutes and weaker storytelling. “No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough,” might as well be the bumper sticker attached to every marathon movie audiences have had to endure over the past few years. But, when it comes to the latest crop of overlong cinematic slogs, there’s another, more apt motto from Orson Welles that filmmakers might benefit from investigating: “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.”
It’s not true for some, but it does apply to most. Hopefully, Hollywood remembers that.