I’ve long been of the belief that every movie should be under 90 minutes or over three hours. Give me The Nightmare Before Christmas (76 minutes) or Seven Samurai (207 minutes), but nothing in between.
I’m (mostly) joking, but it’s no joking matter how much people seem to not want to watch movies that are over two hours.
A recent poll of 2,000 Americans found that the “ideal” movie runtime is 92 minutes, according to Talker Research. That makes sense. If I was asked to pick between two movies but was only told the runtimes, not the titles, I would almost always choose the shorter film. I’ve got things to do (mindlessly scroll through Twitter). But worryingly, only 15 percent of those polled “want to sit through a movie that’s two hours or longer,” while the number drops to two percent if the film is over two and a half hours. Meanwhile, people sit through an entire season of a streaming series in a day without complaint.
The Guardian has more:
Recent research by What to Watch suggests that the average running time of the most commercially successful films is increasing, with an average of 141 minutes in 2022 compared with 110 minutes in 1981. A number of reasons have been advanced, from streaming platforms’ ability to ignore the rigidity of cinema screening schedules, to the desire to showcase expensive visual effects and action sequences that have proliferated over the last decade.
The funny thing is, three of the four highest-grossing movies of all-time are over three hours: Avengers: Endgame, Avatar: The Way of Water, and Titanic (it would be four out of four if box office king Avatar was 18 minutes longer).
So, what’s the actual “ideal” runtime for a movie? If it’s good, as long as it needs to be.
