Movies are really long these days. Avatar: The Way of Water was almost as long as Titanic. Oppenheimer was only slightly shorter, as was Avengers: Endgame. All three gobbled up money like it was going out of fashion. Audiences, perhaps used to binge-watching TV, clearly aren’t opposed to endless cinema. But it seems one movie may have broken them.
Per Variety, some theaters have been adding an intermission to Killers of the Flower Moon. The latest from TikTok star Martin Scorsese runs a whopping three hours and 26 minutes. That’s a few minutes shorter than The Irishman. But that film was largely seen at home, over Netflix. People could pause for bathroom and snack breaks, or just to stretch their legs. And so some venues have been pausing the film around the two-hour mark.
When the Flower Moon team caught wind of this, they weren’t happy. After all, if Scorsese and his team intended for there to be an intermission, they would have added one.
“I understand that somebody’s running it with an intermission which is not right,” said Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese’s longtime editor. “That’s a violation so I have to find out about it.”
After one theater in Colorado showed the epic docudrama with a break, they were reprimanded by Paramount and Apple Original Films, who distributed the film. They then nixed their intermissions.
Alas, moviegoers were reportedly happy to get a break.
“Everybody was really into it because it’s a longer movie, and they’re like, ‘I wish we would have had it for Oppenheimer,’” one anonymous person told The Hollywood Reporter (though it’s unclear if this is the same Colorado theater). “People could come out, order another drink, stretch their legs, go to the bathroom and not miss anything.”
They added, “People were big fans of it. We were going to keep doing it going forward with longer movies, but now it doesn’t seem like an option.”
But some respected Scorsese and team’s intent. “Outside of the debate of whether or not there should be an intermission, or whether or not that creative or artistic choice should have been made,” a theater manager said, “Paramount has done exactly what all movie lovers hope studios would do, which is help create a director’s vision onscreen in exactly the way that the director wants it to be seen.”
Scorsese has yet to comment on the intermissions. But he’s clearly unmoved by people carping about long movies in the age of binge-watching.
“People say it’s three hours, but come on, you can sit in front of the TV and watch something for five hours,” he recently told The Hindustan Times. “Also, there are many people who watch theatre for 3.5 hours. There are real actors on stage, you can’t get up and walk around. You give it that respect, give cinema some respect.”
Killers of the Flower Moon is now in theaters.
(Variety and THR)
