Your bladder isn’t lying. Movies are getting longer

Your bladder isn’t lying. Movies are getting longer.

All kinds of films, from big-budget spectacles to art house dramas, are stretching their run times. It’s an old saying that a short movie can feel long and a long movie can feel short. But data, not just bathroom runs, shows that run time inflation is real at the movies.

After analysing 36,431 movies released theatrically from 1980 to 2025, researcher Stephen Follows found that the average length of a wide-release movie has grown from 106 to 114 minutes.

For most who frequent the movie theatre, this isn’t surprising. It’s become a regular feature of the prerelease anticipation of a movie: How long is it? When the official run time of The Odyssey was released (173 minutes), for some it was as if Christopher Nolan had laid down a challenge as intimidating as the Cyclops.

But there’s little evidence that long run times are dissuading moviegoers. They may even be a draw. The Odyssey is the second-highest grossing movie of the year, with $US1.8 billion ($2.6 billion) in ticket sales, and the front-runner for best picture at the Oscars.

Still, the shift has changed the whole ecosystem around movies. Ahead of last year’s Venice Film Festival, festival boss Alberto Barbera noted that movies running 2¼ hours or 2½ hours had become “the new international standard”.

This, Barbera said, could be a programming annoyance as well as a knock on an otherwise good film. The festival selection committee, he said, often saw films that would have benefited from being 10 to 20 minutes shorter.

This year, three films viewed as top Oscar contenders – The Odyssey, La Bola Negra (159 minutes) and You Can See Everything (174 minutes) – all easily run more than 2½ hours. It’s far from just the awards movies, though. The upcoming Hunger Games movie, Sunrise on the Reaping, is 158 minutes long, a new high for the franchise. Any way you cut it, that’s a lot of reaping.

The advent of streaming has led the movies to seek larger screens and longer run times. When the flat-screen enticements at home are so great, the movies strive to be bona fide events to get people to come out. Bigger is better, or so the thinking goes.

No one knows this better than Joe and Anthony Russo, stewards of the Avengers movies including the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday.

“The movie going experience is evolving,” Joe Russo said in a recent interview. “Eventised cinema seems to be the draw to get people out of their homes. That can be premium storytelling, premium movie going experience, and length can certainly contribute to the feeling of an experience. In a lot of ways, it’s the feeling of getting your money’s worth.”

Doomsday doesn’t yet have an announced run time, though that hasn’t stopped a sizable cottage industry of coverage committed to pinning down its length. The Russos expect it to be closer to 2½ hours, slimmed down from the three-hour-long Endgame and relatively slender given that it contains a sizable portion of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

For Russo, bigger is good, but not automatically better.

“It doesn’t mean that you can’t pack a punch in a shorter run time,” Russo said. “It’s whatever the story requires. It’s about squeezing the story into a diamond, and if that diamond ends up 3½ hours, sure. If it ends up 2½ hours, sure.”

For some filmmakers, slowing down is important

The Japanese filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi makes movies that are almost the diametric opposite of a superhero film, yet he has arrived at similar run times.

Hamaguchi’s films are resolutely human-scaled; they move with the rhythm of life. His Drive My Car (2021), the first Japanese film nominated for best picture, ran just under three hours. His movies are patient powerhouses that reject conventional movie plotting.

“Storytelling as an action, you’re sort of forcing certain things to happen to make an interesting film,” Hamaguchi said. “Oftentimes, when I watch other films, they say this is how it is and continue to push the plot forward. I find that to be uncomfortable.”

Hamaguchi was speaking in an interview shortly after the Cannes Film Festival premiere of his latest film, All of a Sudden. Contrary to its title, it runs 197 minutes. But the film, which Neon will release in the US on November 25 and in Australia in February, is one of the gentlest and most enlightening movies of the year. Fittingly, it’s about time.

Virginie Efira stars as the director of a Paris nursing home where she’s introducing a more humane but time-consuming care technique called Humanitude. She encounters resistance from some staff but finds life improves for both the facility’s patients and its employees.

For Hamaguchi, that message applies as much to movies as it does elder care.

“My own values and thoughts around filmmaking come into the film,” he said. “I first learned about Humanitude in a different context and I decided to work within the field of caregiving. But when I started to research about it, I realised there were so many shared issues in common with the film industry.”

Not everyone shares the feeling that movies need to push closer to the three-hour mark. Polish filmmaker Paweł Pawlikowski has made three acclaimed films in a row, all 90 minutes or less. He’s not necessarily against longer-running movies, but he sets out to distil his films down to their most potent elements.

“I love Lawrence of Arabia. It felt proportionate to the film and the landscape,” says Pawlikowski of David Lean’s 327-minute 1962 epic. “But nowadays there are films where it’s just too much. There are five endings and it’s just showing off. I won’t mention names but there are some really great directors doing it, too.”

Pawlikowski’s latest, Fatherland, is a neat 82 minutes. Yet despite, or possibly because of its concision, Fatherland is an uncommonly rich experience, starring Hanns Zischler as the German Nobel laureate novelist Thomas Mann and Sandra Hüller his daughter, Erika. They’re on a road trip through Germany in the aftermath of World War II.

Pawlikowski is keenly aware that he’s swimming against the long-movie current.

“It feels a bit controversial what I’m doing,” Pawlikowski says, chuckling. “I’m quite aware that it’s provocative to be so stripped down. I’m all into simplifying life, anyways. Stick to your friends. Like what you like. Try to be honest. If you can do that in film, or any kind of art form, it helps.”

AP

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