Today, Explained - Are movies too long now?

Episode Date: December 8, 2023

No, movies aren’t getting longer. Even though, yes, it definitely does feel like they are. Slate’s Sam Adams makes it make sense. This episode was produced by Victoria Chamberlin, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Isabel Angell, engineered by David Herman, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today explained Sean Ramos from when I went to see Killers of the Flower Moon. It was an experience And I'm not even talking about the movie experience the experience started the night before When I had to make sure I got enough sleep to see a three and a half hour movie on Saturday and it continued all day that Saturday when I had to make sure I didn't do too much So I wasn't exhausted by the time I got to the three and a half hour movie and the experience Really started to hit in the hours before the three and a half hour movie when I had to think about eating and drinking don't eat too much or you'll be tired but eat enough that you'll not be hungry and don't drink too much or you'll have to leave for the toilet but drink enough to not be parched and I pulled it off I didn't fall asleep I didn't need the

bathroom but I was still wanting an intermission Marty I. I don't know. I don't know what you said, but it must have been Indian for handsome devil. Why does it seem like movies are so dang long now? That's coming up on the show. The all-new FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino is bringing you more action than ever. Want more ways to follow your faves? Check out our new player prop tracking with real-time notifications.

Or how about more ways to customize your casino page with our new favorite and recently played games tabs. And to top it all off, quick and secure withdrawals. Get more everything with FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca. And now, on with the show. Today Explained. Sam Adams, you write about culture at Slate. Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon,

Napoleon now, all three hours long or approaching three hours. I think there's like a seven hour cut of Napoleon or something. It's got a lot of people saying movies should be shorter. Is that what made you write an investigation about long movies for Slate? As long as I've been reading about movies, certainly people have been saying that they've been too long. It comes up, especially this time every year, because this is when we get the sort of like big prestige releases from the studios, which tend to be longer and more epic. So I went into this with the assumption that, you know, movies are getting longer. And I was, you know, prepared to argue, at least in defense of that, because some of those long movies I think are really great. I like that feeling of a big expansive story that takes you places. But then when you actually look

at the data, it's true that movies have gotten longer over the last hundred years or something, but that basically peaks in 1960 for several reasons. 1960? Yes. That's when we start to get the 90-minute to two-hour movie that we sort of think of as like a regular length now, and it really hasn't changed in the last 60, 70 years. Let's just start with the fact that this complaint isn't new, because it feels like this is very much a contemporary issue. But how long have people been complaining about movies being too long? Yeah, I couldn't find the first time that people were complaining about movies overall being too long. I loved the arrival of a twin. C'est magnifique. But I don't see why it had to be

50 whole seconds. I think certainly when you had this period in the 1950s where the studio started to roll out what they called roadshow versions of movies, sort of big, overblown, often musicals like Oklahoma or The Sound of Music, they would do them as a sort of all-evening affair. They would have intermissions, they would have printed programs because they were trying to emphasize how movies were different from TV. That often meant movies that were just longer than they needed to be just because they needed them to feel big. So people complained about those specific movies being too long.

When people started complaining about movies overall being too long, I know at least as early as the early 1990s. So it's, you know, 30, 40 years at minimum. And what were people complaining about in the 90s? Well, it's almost quaint. You know, in the 1990s, this article I found in Entertainment Weekly was saying, well, you know, these movies are 121 minutes long. They're over two hours. I was like, oh, you sweet summer child. Here's the short of it.

A Few Good Men, 138 minutes, is the latest of a literally growing group of really long movies. In fact, a little investigation proves that running times for feature films have stretched from an average of 90 minutes in the 1930s to 121 minutes today. Because now we're looking at, you know, the average movie in the box office top 10 this year is two hours and 23 minutes. If you look at the all-time top 10 box office movies, the top four are all over two hours and 40 minutes. So it does feel like these, certainly the biggest, noisiest movies that take up the most space are getting longer. People have been feeling this way for decades. What does the data say? What is actually going on with movie lengths? Are they getting longer? Yeah, so people have been feeling that movies have been getting

longer for a long time. But if you look at the numbers, that isn't really true. There's a period sort of at the beginning of the sound era, sort of 1930 to 1960, where average running times do go up significantly. Then one morning you wake up, the guy's gone, the saxophone's gone, all that's left behind is a pair of old socks and a tube of toothpaste. And then in 1960 it basically plateaus. I think there are a couple of reasons for that. One is just, you know, filmmakers and studios kind of getting used to this new medium, finding a kind of comfortable monoform that's roughly the same length as a stage plate. Also what happens in 1960 is that you really start to lose the double feature structure of movies, which is where there was sort of an A picture,

which is basically what we would think of as sort of regular movie length now, and then this whole separate class of B movies, which were a little over an hour, sort of 60 to 75 minutes long. Those basically get phased out in the 1960s, so it's, it's, you just lose a whole class of short movies. And that's why the average plateaus at that point. But since 1960, it really hasn't changed very much. You find the sort of average movie length is basically now what it was then. So almost no matter what age you are, the movies now are on average, at least the same length as they were when you were growing up.

Wait, what was going on in the 1960s that people would want to go see two movies at once? I know that's still a thing that you can find at like a repertory cinema, but for the most part, people just want the one movie these days, obviously. You know, you would spend a day at the pictures and there would be, you know, newsreels. December 7th, 1941. No American will ever forget this Sunday morning in Hawaii. And cartoons and multiple movies playing, and you would just kind of wander in when you felt like it and leave when you left. And if that was in the middle of a movie, at either end, that was just how it was. You would come in and stay until you got to the point when it played the second time, and then you would leave.

So you might be there for three, four, five hours, but it wasn't just for one film. In 1960, one of the things that happened is that's the year that Psycho came out, and there's this very famous advertising campaign where they said, I've suggested that Psycho be seen from the beginning. In fact, this is more than a suggestion. It is required. And here is what Broadway saw. No one, but no one, will be admitted to the theater after the start of each performance of Psycho. You know, supposedly to preserve the surprise, and it was a brilliant marketing move on Hitchcock's part. But the reason why they had to take out those ads is because that was not how people watched movies then.

This, of course, is to help you enjoy Psycho more. We really have only your enjoyment in mind. So it was kind of the advent of a single movie as a discrete event. So rather than just like spending the day at the pictures, you were going to one movie. And that really changed the way that people related to the whole experience. You want to see it again? Can we? So Alfred Hitchcock was powerful enough to one, sort of scold people into showing up on time when that wasn't the norm, and then powerful enough to change the way the entire country saw movies? Yeah, I mean, it's funny because Psycho was, I think people don't realize this now, but it was a pretty sort of low-budget, not quite underground picture for him, but it was not sort of a big major release. They

needed to do something clever to get people's attention. So this was a gimmick, no different than like William Castle putting like electric buzzers in people's seats to give them a jolt. At any time you are conscious of a tingling sensation, you may obtain immediate relief by screaming. Don't be embarrassed about opening your mouth and letting rip with all you've got, because the person in the seat right next to you will probably be screaming too. But it's just brilliant marketing, and people were so intrigued by this idea. My God, there's a surprise in this movie so big that if you don't see it all the way through, it's going to ruin it. Lines around the block and the lines themselves

then became advertising for the film as well. Okay. So that's the sea change moment in the movie going experience in the United States. It's back when Psycho comes out in the 1960s, but you're also saying that since then, there's no major difference in the average runtime of movies. But you did point out that in the 90s, there was an article in Entertainment Weekly complaining about a two-hour movie and that all of the top box office movies of, say, 2022, 2023 are running longer than that, more or less. What's going on then? Yeah. So what I've found when I looked at the numbers is that the average length of a movie has not changed since 1960.

What has changed is the most popular movies have gotten much longer. If you look at that box office top 10 from 1993, 30 years ago. Didn't you see Fatal Attraction? You wouldn't let me. Well, I saw it. I didn't kill my wife. I don't care. If you average all the movies in the top 10 in 1993 together, the average length is about two hours. This year, it's two hours and 23 minutes. And while movies overall have not gotten longer, the movies that are making the most money, that are taking up the most attention, that occupy the biggest place in the culture have gotten a lot longer.

And I think that's why it feels like overall they have, because the ones we're paying the most attention to have. And so we're not just talking about Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon. You're talking about all of the top grossing movies, which certainly involve some people wearing like tight suits and flying around. Can the Spider-Man come out today? Yeah. I mean, I think the superhero movies, certainly when you're talking about the box Can the Spider-Man come out today? huge ripples there. And so it's not driving what the industry does in the future, but a movie like Avengers Endgame or Avatar 2, those are really going to determine sort of what the studios are making in the future. And audiences are, you know, by and large, turning out spending the most money on those longest movies. What was interesting to me, this is not a conclusion I would have come to before looking through this, is that, I mean, but the data sort of says this unequivocally, the reason that movies keep getting longer

is because the longer movies are more popular. Those are the movies that most people are going to see. So people may complain and they may feel that movies are too long, but when they vote with their box office dollars, those are actually the ones that they are preferring to see. Which means, you know, if we're rewarding studios and directors and writers for the longer movies by going to see them, we're going to get more of those, right? Yes. I mean, Hollywood is extremely reactive that way.

So they will make more of what people go to see. So as long as people keep spending the most money to go see these longer movies, they're going to keep making them long. Enjoy the show. Can we at least get an intermission, though? I'm going to ask Sam when we're back on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures Thank you. and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an AuraFrame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an AuraFrame for himself.

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It's amazing. Welcome to the movies. Welcome to Today's Explained. Sam Adams, Slate. So it seems like movies aren't going to get any shorter anytime soon based on the fact that people keep going to see the long movies. But can we at least get intermissions? I think the short answer is unfortunately no, for a couple of reasons. One is that as far as I could tell, the theaters don't want them. It seems like it would work to the theater's benefit

if you give people a little break in the middle of the movie to go out and buy another popcorn, another soda, whatever. Delicious things to eat. The popcorn can't be beat. The sparkling drinks are just so good. But, you know, intermissions are, you know, six to ten minutes. That is not a ton of time if you've, you know, waited in line at a theater for food. So it really does not, as far as I i can tell add to their bottom line in any

significant way and it does make the whole experience take longer it's sort of a funny thing that people are complaining about movies being too long and then requesting that the experience actually be longer by putting a break in the middle of it but like if 200 people get up to go buy a popcorn that costs like five bucks and a soda that costs like five bucks. How is that not adding to the bottom line? That's like $2,000. I think maybe that, you know, the break is just too short for that or it's,

you know, people buy more if they're stocking up for a three hour movie, then they know they'll have another chance in the middle. I don't know exactly what it is, but theaters, I think have not found that it's worth certainly the hassle of having crowds spill out into the hallway and come back in in the middle of the movie while they're seating 12 other screens.

It just doesn't seem to work out to their benefit. And I don't think the studios or the directors really want to add them either. It does fundamentally change the experience. And I think what they would rather do is what James Cameron said when people asked him about adding an intermission to Avatar 2. He said, you know what? Go run, pee whenever you want to. Then you can see the part you missed when you come back and pay to see the movie a second time.

I think that's the strategy. That doesn't feel like a winning strategy. I saw Avatar outside the United States and they threw an intermission in the middle of the movie at a perfect moment that made so much sense that you would have thought that James Cameron came up with this intermission himself. And a bunch of people went up, went to the bathroom, got snacks, came back, and it felt like a good deal for everyone. Was that like a rogue intermission? I mean, it was a rogue intermission as far as that movie is concerned. You know, every Hollywood movie goes out with an exhibition contract which says, essentially,

you have to play in the movie that we gave you. And this goes back to theaters in more conservative areas, sort of, you know, cutting out sex scenes, cutting out interracial kisses, things like that. So, no change in the movie. That includes putting a break in the middle of it. I don't know, you know, if they send it to a country like India, for example, where intermissions in the movie in the middle of a long movie are par for the course. That's sort of how they're regularly exhibited. Maybe they have the permission to do that in Avatar or something like that, because that's the tradition, that's the movie culture there. So it's a totally different experience. And if a movie certainly is built in two parts,

if it comes with an intermission and it's built to kind of go to a climax in the middle and start over again, you know, by all means take that break. It's a two act experience. That's how you should watch it. It's more the matter of putting that into the middle of something where it's not meant to be. Well, it's powerful. So we need to be quiet for a while. It's good for the crops, that's for sure. Just be still.

You know, it is funny to me that this comes up with Killers of the Flower Moon so intensely. When it's like 10 or 15 minutes longer than Avengers 3 or Avatar 2. It is almost exactly the length of a show on Taylor Swift's Eros tour. So we're perfectly capable of sitting through these things as single experiences without feeling like there needs to be a break in the middle. And I think it just feels like, possibly because of the nature of what Killers of the Flower Moon is, it feels like a bigger ask to have to sit through this thing without a pause. Well, this maybe gets to the heart of the matter here, because Martin Scorsese himself has said Avengers movies, Marvel movies, superhero movies aren't really cinema.

The value of a film that's like a theme park film, for example, the Marvel type pictures, where the theaters become amusement parks, that's a different experience. And it's like, it's not even, I was saying earlier, it's not cinema, it's something else. else you know whether you go for that or not but it is something else and they shouldn't be we shouldn't be invaded by it and he obviously was trying to make some cinema and his movie is at times very difficult to watch you got to watch innocent people being murdered over and over and over again without any respite, without a release. That is the point. I mean, I certainly understand wanting a break from that. I wanted it too. I definitely have seen sort of new Native American viewers talking on social media about this just

being this unrelenting assault and really feeling kind of traumatized by the experience. And I'm certainly not going to tell them not to feel that way. I understand why they do. But I think the relentlessness of, you know, essentially genocide that you're watching in this film is part of the point. It is not something that he wants to give people an out from a chance to like catch their breath. He really wants the kind of really numbing regularity of these murders against the Osage to pile up and get to you. And so I think that's part of the design. Turning the lens, turning the big lens, the most golden lens into areas where our communities, you know, we're speaking of the 1920s, Osage community.

We're talking about Black Wall Street in Tulsa. We're talking about a lot in our film. And why the hell does the world not know about these things? Our communities always have. You know, the theatrical experience that they were designing it for, you're really not meant to have an escape from that. You have to sit through it and feel the full weight of what's happening in the story and what happened in real life. That really struck a chord with me when you pointed that out in

your piece for Slate. The thing that made me want an intermission is the exact reason that he didn't give me one. And then it occurred to me that maybe the real solution here for all the people who want an intermission, who want shorter movies, is to see different movies. Yeah, I mean, there are obviously plenty of shorter movies out there that are ones that are much easier to watch than Killers of the Flower Moon. You have an endless array of choices at your local cinema. But I do think there is something at least potentially special about the experience of watching a certain kind of long movie when

the running time is used intelligently by a smart filmmaker who is really thinking about the kind of experience they are putting you through in the seats and not just kind of letting the story run long as a sort of cheat code to make something feel epic or important. I love your name, Marilyn Monroe. So totally phony. I love it. And I think that happens a lot too, and that's part of the reason why it feels like movies are getting too long,

because some of them definitely are. There are movies that are essentially using bloated running times as a kind of, just a way of signifying that they're important without actually being important, making you feel like something you have to see. I don't think the reason that, for example, the Marvels is the biggest box office bomb in the Marvel Cinematic Universe's history

is because it's the shortest film. And there's the numbers right there. $54.8 million, a full million dollars shy of what The Hulk did 15 years ago. But does the fact that it's an hour and 45 minutes, whereas Avengers Endgame is over three hours, does it make it feel a little more skippable? Probably.

And then when it comes to the Napoleons and the Oppenheimers and the killers of the Flower Moon, you feel like these are the movies that are maybe earning it? Some of them are, yeah. And Napoleon's an interesting case because that's a two and a half hour movie that actually feels way too short. It feels sort of weirdly cut up and sort of sliced and diced because there is a four hour cut of it that Ridley Scott is going to be putting out on streaming. And that's his preferred version. So that's a case where this pretty long movie feels like there's not enough of it. There's a quote from Roger Ebert that is required to use when you have this discussion, which is that no good movie is too long and no bad movie is short

enough. And I think that's indisputably true. If you watch a movie like Napoleon, which is two and a half hours long, I want to see the four-hour cut of that, even though it was kind of iffy on the two and a half hour version. It just feels like there's not enough. It feels like there's things missing. So I'm curious to see the full version of that. You can't wait to see a four-hour version of that movie. I can't. I mean, maybe I'm a glutton for punishment. That is a perfectly fair conclusion here. One of the reasons I sort of advocate for this particular theatrical experience of seeing all three hours and 20 minutes of Killers at the Flower Moon in the theater without a break is it's kind of the last place in our society where you can do something for that long without

interruption. I have a teenager and two dogs, and there's no way I'm getting through a three-hour and 20-minute movie at home without some sort of interruption. It's just not going to happen. Movie theater is the only place where I get that amount of time to concentrate on one thing for that long. And I think that is an important experience to preserve. And how many times do you think you'll get interrupted during the four-hour cut of Napoleon at home? 85. You can watch it over the course of two weeks, maybe. How many times do you think you'll get interrupted during the four-hour cut of Napoleon? At 85? You can watch it over the course of two weeks, maybe. Yes, I mean, yes.

I mean, it will definitely not be watched in a single sitting and probably not in a single day. Long live the emperor! Long live the emperor! Sam Adams, read him at Slate. His piece that inspired our episode is titled What the Debate Over Long Movies Gets Wrong. Today's show was edited by Matthew Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Isabel Angel, mixed by David Herman, and produced by Victoria Chamberlain,

who had to bring a breast pump to Oppenheimer because it was so dang long. But she says it was worth it. Totally worth it. The rest of us at Today Explained are Halima Shah, Avishai Artsy, Hadi Mawagdi, Amanda Llewellyn, Miles Bryan, Siona Petros, Patrick Boyd, Rob Byers, and of course, Noel King. Our supervising producer is Amina Alsadi. Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy.

We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder. And Today Explained is distributed by WNYC. The show is a part of Vox, which is free. Thanks in part to contributions from our listeners. Join us at vox.com slash give. And thank you.