Flasz On Film

Twenty-five years ago, the average tentpole blockbuster ran for just about two hours. In fact, throughout the history of theatrically exhibited movies, the two-hour mark was treated as a bit of a gold standard. Jaws ran for 124 minutes, Rocky ran for 119 minutes, Jurassic Park ran for 127 minutes, and Alien ran for 116.

Naturally, there are exceptions to this and you don’t have to think very hard to find examples of movies which vastly exceed this value. Think The Godfather, Casino, Gone with the Wind, Titanic, Saving Private Ryan. The list goes on. However, in the movie business—because the entertainment industry is a business whose goal is to make money after all, despite our best efforts to pretend it is not the case—the two-hour mark has always been treated as a useful guideline which filmmakers and producers would keep in mind. On average, in the 70s, 80s and 90s, the bulk of financially successful movies would hover underneath this value, but with each passing year and each passing decade, together with increasing budgets required to produce movies to be screened in front of mass audiences, their running times would creep up little by little.

Thus, while in the 70s and 80s it was customary to find movies running well below the 120-minute threshold, the late 90s and the early 2000s brought the average blockbuster above that mark. Now, in the past there have been times when studio producers would even attempt to influence filmmakers to shorten their movies to make sure they fit within that two-hour window and one example I distinctly remember was when John Cassavetes was asked to take out over 30 minutes of running time out of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie to make sure the film would fit within that standard theatrical window. By the way, that window is there for a reason because any film substantially longer than two hours can be shown fewer times on the same screen during one day, which may hamper its chances of making satisfactory revenue. Now, some filmmakers don’t need to worry about that because their fans would gladly sit through their movies regardless of how long they are (think Christopher Nolan, James Cameron or Martin Scorsese), but a more niche production may be hindered by its running time and the cinema might either outright refuse to screen it or quickly replace it with a more lucrative alternative. After all, theatrical exhibitors are in the business of making money too and a movie which doesn’t put butts in seats is a movie which doesn’t put dollars in the coffers of theater owners. And if two screenings of a niche artsy-fartsy movie with a 160-minute running time can be effectively replaced with three screenings of a 118-minute juggernaut, it’s a no-brainer for anyone who has ever interacted with a wallet.

What I find interesting, though, is that over the course of the last twenty-five years, Hollywood filmmakers and producers have seemingly abandoned this idea of keeping the running time tight or maybe forgot that two-hour gold standard existed in the first place. In 2000, the average running time of the top 10 highest-grossing movies at the box office was 120.9 minutes, while it grew to a whopping 140 in 2023. That’s a 16% increase. Meanwhile, the total global box office take grew from 3.5 billion dollars in 2000 to 8.3 billion in that time. If the pandemic hadn’t happened, it would have likely trended towards 15 billion by now because it topped 13 billion in 2019. Now, you also must remember that the ticket prices have gone steadily up in that time period and the ticket sales have trended down, so you’d have to take the inflation out of the picture to dig out true values of the global box office, but the trend is nonetheless there. Most successful movies have been getting longer and longer and longer.

Consequently, I can only imagine that the production budget bloat is a partial by-product of this phenomenon because it’s either that more film stock one needs to burn, more shooting time one needs to schedule and prosecute, or more frames of special effects shots need to be generated and polished to make a longer movie. Fundamentally, it runs counter to business logic to spend more money producing a longer movie and therefore gamble with a bigger pile of money because it will take more ticket sales to break even and generate a profit. And I’m not even factoring marketing and press in this calculation either. The sound business mind would look at Disney or WB and compare to what, say, Blumhouse and A24 are doing and clearly point to the latter two as the ones who generate better returns because they can bring tenfold or twentyfold of what they invested in any given movie without breaking a sweat. Meanwhile, a new Marvel movie must make a billion to get into the green. Sure, Disney makes more money on merchandise and other licencing deals but their movies are massive gambles… which have become bigger than they would have been twenty-five years ago.

It is as though studio execs decided (or allowed it to happen by sheer inertia) that in a landscape where a trip to the movies is an expensive business decision for a moviegoer, they’d rather make it a “more is better” kind of experience where the viewer would feel they’re getting their money’s worth because they get to sit in the dark for longer. Bedsores equal quality, I guess. I suppose, there’s more to this effect and I might come back to this at a later date to scratch it a bit further because with the eventual disappearance of the mid-budget movie from the theatrical slate, all we have screening in multiplexes are the big tentpole releases and just a tiny bit of counterprogramming, while a lot of the movies we’d have seen theatrically twenty-five years ago have been relegated to streaming platforms as their primary delivery drivers. The theatrical experience has become an event, partly because it now takes the entire evening or an afternoon. Think about it. It’s now quite a challenge to go to dinner and a movie because you will either have to have your dinner quite early in the day or go to a later screening and emerge from the cinema at midnight, because a 150-minute blockbuster is in effect a 180-minute theatrical fixture with ads and trailers playing in front of it. That’s an evening already.

No wonder people think twice before going to the movies because it truly is an expedition. You can’t pause Avatar: The Way of Water if you want to go to the loo and you will want to go to the bathroom, that’s for blooming sure. Unless you’re a camel or you’re as well trained in the ancient art of holding water as yours truly, you will simply go and pay to see a movie you won’t see in full. At this point we might want to reconsider resurrecting the good old-fashioned intermission, but this will extend that theatrical window further and eat into the exhibitor’s profit margins even more substantially. Seriously, it is as though film producers wanted us to stay home and watch their biggest releases on our piddly TV screens, courtesy of the myriad subscriptions we pay for on a monthly basis… which is what we did during COVID and that didn’t work very well, did it? If it had worked, Hollywood execs, exhibitors (whose ire I do understand) and filmmakers themselves wouldn’t have clamoured for cinemas to come back. We did have the freedom to watch what we want at home and pause what we want when we want to go take that piss break at our leisure. And we probably won’t ever find how many people failed to finish watching some of those otherwise massive releases when they had the freedom to do so, because streaming platforms keep this data to themselves. They’ll happily tell us how many bajillion people started watching whatever streaming original they’d like to showboat about, but the retention numbers are a bit more safely guarded. And I’d like to see whether there is a difference in completion rates between long and short movies in addition to finding how often longer screenings are broken down into chunks, and what the sizes of those chunks are on average.

This sneaking suspicion of mine that when presented with an option to do so many filmgoers would gladly break up a screening of a 160-minute bloatbuster into smaller chunks perhaps reflects a cultural trend of sorts. Do you remember that time—and it was a bit of an outrage of its own making because it did interfere with the filmmaker’s vision—when Scorsese’s The Irishman was reformatted by Netflix into a four-part miniseries? Sure, where’s my pitchfork and stuff, but if you think about it, this decision by Netflix execs, who do see the numbers by the way, must have reflected a worrying trend of people starting and not finishing the movie. And we do live in a world where every single thought conjured in the mind of the average user of the Internet will one way or another make its way into the cloud and become a part of the culture’s permanent record. Therefore, every time some dude in the middle-of-nowhere-Wisconsin gives up on a movie partway through, there is a non-zero chance he’s going to tweetpost about it or record a scathing TikTok from the safety afforded by the four walls of his bathroom.

While the big Hollywood players bank on the bloatbuster experience being what drives people into theaters, regular people seem to prefer shorter movies in the first place. I think this is well documented and this cultural trend of preferring to watch shorter movies has a number of factors underpinning its existence. For once, there’s the simple idea of availability of free time because we all work for a living, have families to care for and when we do eventually sit down to watch a movie—and most of us watch movies on streaming platforms first, then maybe on physical media and then maybe on pre-programmed TV, in descending order of likelihood—we might not have the three hours it takes to watch Avengers: Endgame. Therefore, the running time of a movie will become a deciding factor when trawling the oceans of streaming libraries, partially paralyzed by the glut of choices. 90 minutes? A no-brainer. 180? Oof. Maybe some other time. Or maybe, if it’s a big blockbuster, give it a poke and watch the first hour.

I suppose the additional factor influencing this bias may be the nascent of TV shows and miniseries as the now dominant form of entertainment consumed in a domestic setting. An episode of The Game of Thrones is just one hour and one bite of The Bear is just 30 minutes, so it’s easy to fit a bitesize chunk of entertainment into an otherwise busy schedule and still feel as though you’ve accomplished something. Plus, a lot of movie-watchers have Letterboxd accounts and many of those people obsessively log what they watch, so—in a mirror scenario to that exhibitor’s screen availability—it’s easier to watch (and log) two 90-minute movies in an evening than one viewing of Killers of the Flower Moon. It’s a numbers game. And it also feeds the perpetually anxious late Millennials and Gen-Zers who suffer from a serious case of the FOMOs.

An interesting side-product to this effect and FOMO as one of its many driving forces is the bias in perceived quality of a movie with relation to its running time, which seems to be unidirectionally self-reinforcing.

What a word salad, yikes. Good job, Jakub. Up top!

What I mean is that it’s unlikely for an excessively long movie to be praised more than if it had been shorter, while it’s more likely for a bad long movie to be perceived as worse because it was long. The running time is an amplifying factor, but in one direction only: negative. Not only was the movie bad, but it was bad and long. Conversely, you will often hear people recommend movie they didn’t necessarily find amazing by stating it’s not that long so the waste of time is comparatively smaller. Anecdotally, I have been a part of such conversations recently where a star rating of a movie was likely positively influenced by the fact the movie was under 90 minutes. I believe it may have been Permanent Midnight we talked about over at Uncut Gems Podcast. A terrible movie which goes on for 86 minutes, ten of which are end credits.

It goes to show that in the age of seemingly infinite choice and where each week sees the release of way too many movies and TV shows anyone could ever find time to watch, the running time becomes the key variable, which also may influence the perceived quality of the movie. After all, we only have a finite amount of time in the day. In fact, time is the only non-exchangeable, non-extendable parameter governing our lives and as such has become the key currency in the world of movie entertainment. However, it would seem that big studio producers have yet to realize it as they happily rubberstamp the production of slowly bloating blockbusters theatrical exhibitors will have to accommodate to make money. I wonder if their gamble of “more bang for your buck” will pay off, or if people will vote with their wallets and choose to watch a tight 90-minute flick at home instead.

Time is money, as they say. But time as a currency functions differently because it’s the scarcest resource we have. Therefore, we might be inching close to a point where potential filmgoers will choose to stay home because, while they are aware that time is money, they also know that less is more.