There's some evidence that movie runtimes have crept up in recent years, but it's all a little iffy. I prefer the data nerd approach taken by Przemysław Jarząbek, who wrote a script to extract all the films from IMDb and plot them by average length each year. Here it is:
This is pretty steady through 2010, then rises about six minutes through 2018. The Economist did a similar calculation and reckons that movie lengths were steady through 2015 but have increased about 14 minutes since then.
So . . . everybody is right. Runtimes of popular movies have gone up recently, but only by perhaps ten or a dozen minutes. Quit yer griping.
Anyway, it's probably our own fault, thanks to our endless appetite for "director's cut" versions of movies, which have probably convinced studios that we'd all like to see a little less footage left on the cutting room floor. Alternatively, maybe it's the effect of less lead poisoning among children. Or the influence of social media on teens. Or greater political polarization. Or any other trend you feel like making a case for. Nominees?
Or nothing. Given the variability in the data, I'd be surprised if the "trend" were statistically significant.
I think it's that shorter movies aren't seen to be as viable as longer ones. What I notice in the chart is the death of the sub-90-minute movie, while the longer run times look to be fairly static (if noisy). This also matches my personal anecdata.
How much of the increase is due to more minutes of credits at the end and more minutes listing all the production partners at the beginning?
That may be part of it.
I miss not having a title sequence at he beginning of movies, and the end credits are always too long.
What really annoys me is the vast page of "Babies Born" to the animation staff during the course of making the movie. Really??
Me too. I like to see who contributed to a film BEFORE I watch it, as in a theater program, not after. Plus good credits sequences often set the tone for a film, which is usually missing now.
And you can't really watch the end credits because people are streaming out of the theater, and they go through a sting of technical credits and "executive producers" before they even get to the names of the principal actors.
Or the endless ads? We went to watch Wicked. Showtime listed at 6:30. Movie didn’t actually start until 7.
I would vote for 15 minutes of commercials at the start and attention spans that have dropped massively due to social platforms and the endless scroll of new eye candy.
Seen it attributed to Schindler's List, Titanic, and a few other 3 hour movies convincing studios that extreme length of a good movie is not the killer of box office receipts.
There are Hollywood execs who were not even born when Schindler’s List came out.
Adjusted for inflation?
🤣
"No good movie is too long, and no bad movie is short enough." --Roger Ebert
+1
The movies miss Roger.
Didn’t see this before I wrote a similar comment
You shall not pass!...110 minutes!
Back in the good old days there was an intermission on those long movies (like the Ten Commandments) to get up and relieve yourself.
Do you know why they did that?
Yes, and I would love to see that brought back - it's what makes for an enjoyable evening out with a long film. No one should have to sit much more than two hours without a break.
Intermissions were common until around 1970. Other films that had them include "The Great Escape", "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World", "West Side Story" and "2001: A Space Odyssey."
"Movie lengths on average have plateaued since the introduction of the talkie 60 years ago, but the length of the average top 10 movie is up from two hours in 1993 to 2 hours and 23 minutes in 2023."
https://www.vox.com/culture/24156463/movies-albums-long-songs-scenes-short
So overall movie length may not have changed but the length of the movies that people actually go to has.
I agree with Roger Ebert, paraphrasing he said basically
A great movie that is 3 hours long can fly by and make you wish it was longer and a bad movie that is 90 minutes long can seem like it is going to last forever
Not if there's no intermission.
I think it's the decline of tight 90 minute comedies and rom-coms -- dramatic adaptations and superhero movies will always tend to run longer.
As Anthony points out, I think is the over reliance on adaptations in modern movies. it seems that 9 out of every 10 movies is an adaptation of some written media which kind of forces the hand of the directors to include as much as possible lest they want to incur the wrath of the fan base for leaving out some detail.
I dunno ... in my limited experience with adaptations, a whole lot of fluff is injected that had no place in the book (aka "written media"). Meanwhile, a lot of the really important stuff was sluffed off. (No, I'm not bothering to figure out the weirdo english-like spelling)
I'd like to see a chart that includes movies from as far back as 1930.
Click the link.
That wouldn't really be a valid comparison since there were many "second features" back then that ran only around 65-70 minutes. Series films like "Blondie" and "The Saint.," for example. That function was taken over by television from 1950 on.
Trying to get a break from Donald Trump.
When I was a kid, local theaters typically showed double features. The movies were shorter, but with trailers and cartoons (I'm old enough to remember even a few newsreels) it turned into a long afternoon. for a 25 cent investment. That was fine with us.,
My own theory is that movies have gone up in length because they are competing with streaming series that provide hours of entertainment -- Wikipedia notes that it was 2013 when the word "binge-watching" "...burst into mainstream use to describe the Netflix practice of releasing seasons of its original programs simultaneously, as opposed to the industry standard model of releasing episodes on a weekly basis."
Back in the 60's Woody Allen decided that no movie of his would be longer than 90 minutes--the usual length of Bergman's films. For a very long time pictures were cut to allow more showings and time out at the concessions: 105 or 110 minutes.
And somehow they managed to make classic pictures.
One of my favorites, "Bad Day At Black Rock", clocks in at 81 minutes.
Well, this is supposedly for everything flagged as a "movie" in the imdb. I'd like to see the stats for just the feature films, those released in general theaters, as opposed to east coast art houses. Also cut out the "shorts" visible only at film festivals ("Night of the Cooters", anyone?) or on one of the streamers.
It has seemed as if a movie (v "film") that clocks in under three hours is becoming rare. Maybe I just don't get out as much as I should, though, or select badly. I've read that "The Return" is just under two hours...
To the best of my recollection, movie credits started getting ridiculously long with the first Christopher Reeve Superman. About 10 mins of credits at the beginning and the end. Almost all of the credits are contractual now, so everyone needs to have their name in them and they will run forever. Only the hunters of Easter Eggs will sit through them in a theatre.
NO, absolutely NO children's movie should be over 90mins (and that includes Mary Poppins and many Disney movies of the 60s and 70s). You can set your watch by when the kids start to get bored and restless. 80mins is a good length.
I see Moana 2 is 100 mins. If 10mins of that is credits, we can considerate in the safe zone.
I have never watched a "director's cut" that I thought was an improvement over the original release, and in many cases I thought it was worse.
Strategic cuts can greatly improve a film. Take one of my favorites, "The French Connection" which clocks in at a little over 100 minutes. On the DVD release they had a documentary that included some scenes that William Friedkin decided to cut. Those scenes would have explained a few plot transitions a little better, but Friedkin was wise to cut them. They would have slowed down what was a masterpiece of pacing.
I stopped watching the "deleted scenes" extras on DVD's (yes, I still deal with DVD's -- well, Blu-ray -- on many occasions) once I realized that every single time I watched them, I came away thinking, "yep, they were deleted for a reason."
I wonder what the chart would look like if it only included non-kid movies. (However you want to define that.) My guess is the length of kids movies have not increased all that much. Therefore, the aggregate increase is spread over just the non-kid movies, which most adults watch. So maybe the average increase in those movies is more than the 10-12 minutes.
"Alternatively, maybe it's the effect of less lead poisoning among children."
Is this one of those "to a hammer, everything looks like a nail" things? Just reflexively going for the pet issue as often as possible. Lame.
Umm, I took it as a joke -- KD gently mocking his own obsession.