Conventional wisdom has it that cinemagoers are tired of very long films. Well, conventional wisdom in this case is talking rubbish. Cinemagoers can’t get enough of very long films – which is convenient, since, what with their being very long, there’s lots of them to be got. For proof, look no further than last year’s UK box-office chart, the top ten entries of which run for an average of two-and-a-quarter hours each. No Time to Die: two hours, 43 minutes. Spider-Man: No Way Home: two hours, 28 minutes. Dune: two hours, 36 minutes, and we’ve still only seen half of it.
Even so, there was widespread grumbling in January when it was confirmed that the final cut of The Batman, Warner Bros’ latest spin on the imperishable DC superhero, ran for 176 minutes including credits – just four minutes shy of three hours. “Excruciatingly long,” said The New York Post. “Waaaaaaaaaaay too long,” offered Gizmodo. “One-and-a-half Twilight movies long,” explained Vulture, helpfully. “Is the world ready for a three-hour Batman movie?” fretted Den of Geek. Well, considering a three-hour Avengers movie is the most commercially successful film ever made, I’m going to go with “probably, yes”.
Nor are very long films a new development. Each of the Harry Potters ran for around two-and-a-half hours, and kids in the test audiences famously said they should have been longer. The Lord of the Rings trilogy ranged between three and three-and-a-half (or three-and-a-half and four-and-a-bit, if you plump for the extended cuts). The epics and extravaganzas of the 1950s and ’60s regularly ran for at least two-and-a-half hours, while back in 1939, Gone with the Wind – still the highest-grossing film ever made, if you adjust ticket prices for inflation – was an appropriately sweeping three hours and 58 minutes, plus a 20-minute intermission. As Vulture might put it, that’s one and a half The Batmans.
But when a film offers its audience the opportunity to become absorbed in a great story, or spend time in a vivid fictional world, a film’s length can be not just an asset, but part of the point. The performative philistinism over the three-and-a-half-hour running time of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman was especially depressing in that regard. I mean, come on: it’s a film about the death of a man’s soul over decades, and the inexorable onward grind of history’s gears. It’s probably not going to have quite the same impact at a zippy 90 minutes.
In truth, it’s cinemas themselves which have always been more suspicious of long films: you can’t show them as many times per day as short ones, and therefore the number of tickets you can sell are reduced. Hence the so-called “blockbuster tax” of one or two pounds – which, since 2014, has been regularly applied in the UK to high-profile new releases. (The additional 3D glasses fee, brought in with Avatar in 2009, was a precursor.)
