Not sure how much can deduced from this sort of poll, especially since it is being contradicted by the types of movies that actually sell tickets. Still, it is an interesting discussion and I am...
Not sure how much can deduced from this sort of poll, especially since it is being contradicted by the types of movies that actually sell tickets. Still, it is an interesting discussion and I am generally in the camp of thinking many movies are too damn long these days. Always good exceptions and a good movie has the proper length it needs and all that, but I get weary especially by action movies that are stretching the two and half hour marks.
I have watched epic films that have zapped by very quickly, and I have watched films that were short in theory (usually commercial Hollywood pictures) but whose every minute seemed to last as long as Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Let’s not tie ourselves to a 92-minute rule.
Personally I feel like it's highly dependant on the type of movie and story being told. A comedy? 92 minutes is probably about right. Action thriller? 92-120 probably about right. Episodic...
Personally I feel like it's highly dependant on the type of movie and story being told. A comedy? 92 minutes is probably about right. Action thriller? 92-120 probably about right. Episodic adventure trilogy with multiple character stories being followed? Those 3 hour Lord of the Rings films, while long, feel quite appropriate to properly tell the story that needs to be told.
There's a lot of different factors I feel would need to go into the "ideal" running time of a movie. There's no way LotR would have been able to tell the story it needed in 92 minutes.
It also comes down to basic comfort....sitting for more than 90 minutes isn't especially fun, especially in traditional theater seats with the crappy cushion and the hard back. I'm willing to...
It also comes down to basic comfort....sitting for more than 90 minutes isn't especially fun, especially in traditional theater seats with the crappy cushion and the hard back. I'm willing to tolerate that discomfort for an especially great movie, but for a mediocre film that could obviously be tightened its frustrating.
I largely agree that there shouldn't be a hard rule for runtime length, with one exception: Kids movies should be hard capped at 80 minutes unless there's a 10 minute intermission. I will die on that hill.
Those traditional type seats haven't been a thing in my country for probably 10 or 15 years. It's all luxurious recliners now that are better to sit in than anything in my own home - and they...
Those traditional type seats haven't been a thing in my country for probably 10 or 15 years. It's all luxurious recliners now that are better to sit in than anything in my own home - and they increased the ticket price accordingly of course..
Considering most of the best films of all time are considerably longer than that, I'm going to have to disagree. I'm not sure how you would even make workable versions of Return of the King or...
Considering most of the best films of all time are considerably longer than that, I'm going to have to disagree. I'm not sure how you would even make workable versions of Return of the King or Lawrence of Arabia in that amount of time.
You would do what Tarentino did for Kill Bill: Two or more movies. 91 + 237 minutes. Kill Bill part 2 was a bit of a slog compared to part 1 if my memory serves. The LOTR movies were great, but I...
You would do what Tarentino did for Kill Bill: Two or more movies. 91 + 237 minutes. Kill Bill part 2 was a bit of a slog compared to part 1 if my memory serves.
The LOTR movies were great, but I think they'd have been better if each movie was split into 2 or 3. That is higher-risk though, and wouldn't have ever been greenlit before the success of the first movie.
Tarantino himself did not want to do this. He wanted Kill Bill distributed as one film, it was split at the behest of the distributor. I think the split release actually hurts the quality of the...
Tarantino himself did not want to do this. He wanted Kill Bill distributed as one film, it was split at the behest of the distributor. I think the split release actually hurts the quality of the film, especially part 2. They are really meant to be watched together and not separately.
I won't disagree, but either way an intermission would be in order. And that Kill Bill 1 is still better for being 90 minutes. Sometimes working within constraints is better than working without...
I won't disagree, but either way an intermission would be in order. And that Kill Bill 1 is still better for being 90 minutes.
Sometimes working within constraints is better than working without them. I'll quote from Stephen King's preface in the complete and uncut release of The Stand (circa 1989):
For the purposes of this book, what's important is that approximately four hundred pages of manuscript were deleted from the final draft. The reason was not an editorial one; if that had been the case, I would be content to let the book live its life and die its eventual death as it was originally published.
The cuts were made at the behest of the accounting department. They toted up production costs, laid these next to the hardcover sales of my previous four books, and decided that a cover price of $12.95 was about what the market would bear (compare that price to this one, friends and neighbors!). I was asked if I would like to make the cuts, or if I would prefer someone in the editorial department to do it. I reluctantly agreed to do the surgery myself. I think I did a fairly good job, for a writer who has been accused over and over again of having diarrhea of the word processor. There is only one place -- Trashcan Man's trip acress the coutry from Indiana to Las Vegas -- that seems noticably scarred in the original version.
[snip]
I haven't restored all four hundred of the missing pages; there is a difference between doing it up right and just being downright vulgar. Some of what was left on the cutting room floor when I turned in the truncated version deserved to be left there, and there it remains.
Working with 92 minutes "as a rule" is a good idea IMO, but with leniency to 'break' it if the director can justify it.
And because I'm quoting from that section anyway, here's a great tangent about what King thought about adaptations before there were any of The Stand:
I am inevitably asked if it is ever going to be a movie. The answer, by the way, is probably yes. Will it be a good one? I don't know. Bad or good, movies nearly always have a strange, diminishing effect on works of fantasy (of course there are exceptions; The Wizard of Oz is an example which springs immediately to mind). In discussions, people are willing to cast various parts endlessly, I've always thought Robert Duval would make a splendid Randall Flagg, but I've heard people suggest such people as Clint Eastwood, Bruce Dern, and Christopher Walken. They all sound good, just as Bruce Springsteen would seem to make an interesting Larry Underwood, if he ever chose to try acting (and, based on his videos, I think he would do very well ... although my personal choice would be Marshall Crenshaw). But in the end, I think it's perhaps best for Stu, Larry, Glen, Frannie, Ralph, Tom Cullen, Lloyd, and that dark fellow to belong to the reader, who will visualize them through the lens of imagination in a vivid and constantly changing way no camera can duplicate. Movies, after all, are only an illusion of motion comprised of thousands of still photographs. The imagination, however, moves with its own tidal flow. Films, even the best of them, freeze fiction --anyone who has ever seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and then reads Ken Kesey's novel will find it hard or impossible not to see Jack Nicholson's face on Randle Patrick McMurphy. This is not necessarily bad...but it is limiting. The glory of a good tale is that it is limitless and fluid; a good tale belongs to each reader in its own particular way.
Kill Bill 2 is absolutely a slog and I only ever rewatched one LotR movie one time and it was absolutely brutal to sit through that second time. I won't deny that they're good movies, but I just...
Kill Bill 2 is absolutely a slog and I only ever rewatched one LotR movie one time and it was absolutely brutal to sit through that second time. I won't deny that they're good movies, but I just don't have the time or patience to sit through them again, even with Two Towers I was about 18 and seeing it in the theater for the second time and was just damned bored.
I'd also take issue with the idea that "The Best Films of All Time"; I know it's widely agreed that something like Lawrence of Arabia was fantastic (haven't seen it), but based on many of those best movies of all time that I've seen, which are often 2+ hours, they could absolutely stand to cut 15-20 minutes of them. Don't get me wrong, I liked 2001: A Space Odyssey, but I'd be more than willing to cut that psychedelic down to a quarter of its 5+ minutes and cut another several minutes from the intro scene.
I'm sure I sound like an absolute tool when I say these things and I am absolutely all about the slow burn, but so many movies, new and old, have so much extraneous shit in them that really don't serve much of a purpose.
If you tried to shorten something like Blade Runner 2049 down to 90 minutes, you would completely destroy the very deliberate pacing of the film, and kill its vibe. I think the same is true of...
If you tried to shorten something like Blade Runner 2049 down to 90 minutes, you would completely destroy the very deliberate pacing of the film, and kill its vibe. I think the same is true of 2001: A Space Odyssey
Movies aren't just a sequence of plot points that you can blast through as quickly as possible and still get the same effect. Some movies have been completely ruined by studio attempts to shorten the runtime. Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven is a famous example.
No, my post was rather glib, I agree. I loved Blade Runner in all its runtime and was absolutely worth the watch. I'm just feeling flustered because I just watched 2001 this week and ended-up...
No, my post was rather glib, I agree.
I loved Blade Runner in all its runtime and was absolutely worth the watch. I'm just feeling flustered because I just watched 2001 this week and ended-up splitting it into two evenings, which I think is an atmosphere killer for me. But also, I did feel the psychedelic scenes in it were entirely too long and obnoxious, being rather unnecessary to be so long, with what I feel is minimal information, atmosphere and tension building.
The so called "best movies of all time" have the length they need. Like 12 angry men is 97 minutes and Casablanca 102, though on average the movies on those lists do tend to be on the longer side....
The so called "best movies of all time" have the length they need. Like 12 angry men is 97 minutes and Casablanca 102, though on average the movies on those lists do tend to be on the longer side. But then, most movies don't need to be at that sort of level and more often I think a movie could be shorter than I wished it was longer.
I'm skeptical that a poll is actually good for this. I often want to watch something that's around this length when I'm thinking about picking a movie, but inevitably when my wife picks something...
I'm skeptical that a poll is actually good for this. I often want to watch something that's around this length when I'm thinking about picking a movie, but inevitably when my wife picks something that's longer (sometimes even close to an hour longer!) I'm shocked at how quickly the time goes by. It turns out I want a movie that doesn't feel longer than 90 minutes while I'm watching it, but what its actual length needs to be is very dependent on the actual movie itself and its pacing.
My favorite movie of all time is 2 hours 10 minutes, and it's an absolutely tight, impeccably edited film. Absolutely nothing could be removed and the pacing is phenomenal. I also wouldn't have been able to tell you its runtime without googling it first.
That's a great point with what people think they enjoy the most for runtime vs what they actually enjoy. Also ties in to the post earlier this week with surveys being dangerous. Particularly I...
That's a great point with what people think they enjoy the most for runtime vs what they actually enjoy. Also ties in to the post earlier this week with surveys being dangerous. Particularly I think this point applies here:
And as I say again and again, and will never tire of repeating, never ask people what they like or don’t like. Liking is a reported mental state and that doesn’t necessarily correspond to any behavior.
If theaters would quit showing a half-hour of previews and ads before a movie, I'd probably be more likely to go and watch them in theaters. Ten to twelve minutes of previews and "let's all go to...
If theaters would quit showing a half-hour of previews and ads before a movie, I'd probably be more likely to go and watch them in theaters. Ten to twelve minutes of previews and "let's all go to the snack bar" ads is about all I can bear.
Two hours seems to be a reasonable amount of time for your average movie. But when that means I have to be in a theater for two and a half hours because I have to view endless ads with Nicole Kidman telling me about the magic of movies at AMC (like I don't already know which theater I went to) then fuck off with that. I wanna watch a film and then hit the bar for at least an hour before last call.
The ads is also a big annoyance for me. Like I already pay almost €18 for a ticket, which in my opinion should be ad free. Knowing this I do sometimes just arrive 15 minutes late but it is silly...
The ads is also a big annoyance for me. Like I already pay almost €18 for a ticket, which in my opinion should be ad free. Knowing this I do sometimes just arrive 15 minutes late but it is silly you have to do that, and it messes with my general sense of punctuality.
That's been my solution to the problem as well. Another much more annoying thing for me though is all the trailers playing just before the movie - I always avoid trailers for movies I know I want...
That's been my solution to the problem as well. Another much more annoying thing for me though is all the trailers playing just before the movie - I always avoid trailers for movies I know I want to see, but then again I also feel that just a poster can reveal too much so my limit for spoilers is impossibly low lol
Not sure how much can deduced from this sort of poll, especially since it is being contradicted by the types of movies that actually sell tickets. Still, it is an interesting discussion and I am generally in the camp of thinking many movies are too damn long these days. Always good exceptions and a good movie has the proper length it needs and all that, but I get weary especially by action movies that are stretching the two and half hour marks.
As a columnist in response to this survey says:
Personally I feel like it's highly dependant on the type of movie and story being told. A comedy? 92 minutes is probably about right. Action thriller? 92-120 probably about right. Episodic adventure trilogy with multiple character stories being followed? Those 3 hour Lord of the Rings films, while long, feel quite appropriate to properly tell the story that needs to be told.
There's a lot of different factors I feel would need to go into the "ideal" running time of a movie. There's no way LotR would have been able to tell the story it needed in 92 minutes.
It also comes down to basic comfort....sitting for more than 90 minutes isn't especially fun, especially in traditional theater seats with the crappy cushion and the hard back. I'm willing to tolerate that discomfort for an especially great movie, but for a mediocre film that could obviously be tightened its frustrating.
I largely agree that there shouldn't be a hard rule for runtime length, with one exception: Kids movies should be hard capped at 80 minutes unless there's a 10 minute intermission. I will die on that hill.
Those traditional type seats haven't been a thing in my country for probably 10 or 15 years. It's all luxurious recliners now that are better to sit in than anything in my own home - and they increased the ticket price accordingly of course..
I've got a theater right by me with them.
Ah, I haven't been to a theater outside of big cities in all that time. Definitely could still be a thing in small towns, didn't realize!
6 movies.
Plus 2 more for the extended edition lol
Considering most of the best films of all time are considerably longer than that, I'm going to have to disagree. I'm not sure how you would even make workable versions of Return of the King or Lawrence of Arabia in that amount of time.
You would do what Tarentino did for Kill Bill: Two or more movies. 91 + 237 minutes. Kill Bill part 2 was a bit of a slog compared to part 1 if my memory serves.
The LOTR movies were great, but I think they'd have been better if each movie was split into 2 or 3. That is higher-risk though, and wouldn't have ever been greenlit before the success of the first movie.
Tarantino himself did not want to do this. He wanted Kill Bill distributed as one film, it was split at the behest of the distributor. I think the split release actually hurts the quality of the film, especially part 2. They are really meant to be watched together and not separately.
I won't disagree, but either way an intermission would be in order. And that Kill Bill 1 is still better for being 90 minutes.
Sometimes working within constraints is better than working without them. I'll quote from Stephen King's preface in the complete and uncut release of The Stand (circa 1989):
Working with 92 minutes "as a rule" is a good idea IMO, but with leniency to 'break' it if the director can justify it.
And because I'm quoting from that section anyway, here's a great tangent about what King thought about adaptations before there were any of The Stand:
Kill Bill 2 is absolutely a slog and I only ever rewatched one LotR movie one time and it was absolutely brutal to sit through that second time. I won't deny that they're good movies, but I just don't have the time or patience to sit through them again, even with Two Towers I was about 18 and seeing it in the theater for the second time and was just damned bored.
I'd also take issue with the idea that "The Best Films of All Time"; I know it's widely agreed that something like Lawrence of Arabia was fantastic (haven't seen it), but based on many of those best movies of all time that I've seen, which are often 2+ hours, they could absolutely stand to cut 15-20 minutes of them. Don't get me wrong, I liked 2001: A Space Odyssey, but I'd be more than willing to cut that psychedelic down to a quarter of its 5+ minutes and cut another several minutes from the intro scene.
I'm sure I sound like an absolute tool when I say these things and I am absolutely all about the slow burn, but so many movies, new and old, have so much extraneous shit in them that really don't serve much of a purpose.
If you tried to shorten something like Blade Runner 2049 down to 90 minutes, you would completely destroy the very deliberate pacing of the film, and kill its vibe. I think the same is true of 2001: A Space Odyssey
Movies aren't just a sequence of plot points that you can blast through as quickly as possible and still get the same effect. Some movies have been completely ruined by studio attempts to shorten the runtime. Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven is a famous example.
No, my post was rather glib, I agree.
I loved Blade Runner in all its runtime and was absolutely worth the watch. I'm just feeling flustered because I just watched 2001 this week and ended-up splitting it into two evenings, which I think is an atmosphere killer for me. But also, I did feel the psychedelic scenes in it were entirely too long and obnoxious, being rather unnecessary to be so long, with what I feel is minimal information, atmosphere and tension building.
2001 is neigh-unwatchable without psychedelics...and I think that's half the point lol.
The so called "best movies of all time" have the length they need. Like 12 angry men is 97 minutes and Casablanca 102, though on average the movies on those lists do tend to be on the longer side. But then, most movies don't need to be at that sort of level and more often I think a movie could be shorter than I wished it was longer.
I'm skeptical that a poll is actually good for this. I often want to watch something that's around this length when I'm thinking about picking a movie, but inevitably when my wife picks something that's longer (sometimes even close to an hour longer!) I'm shocked at how quickly the time goes by. It turns out I want a movie that doesn't feel longer than 90 minutes while I'm watching it, but what its actual length needs to be is very dependent on the actual movie itself and its pacing.
My favorite movie of all time is 2 hours 10 minutes, and it's an absolutely tight, impeccably edited film. Absolutely nothing could be removed and the pacing is phenomenal. I also wouldn't have been able to tell you its runtime without googling it first.
That's a great point with what people think they enjoy the most for runtime vs what they actually enjoy. Also ties in to the post earlier this week with surveys being dangerous. Particularly I think this point applies here:
If theaters would quit showing a half-hour of previews and ads before a movie, I'd probably be more likely to go and watch them in theaters. Ten to twelve minutes of previews and "let's all go to the snack bar" ads is about all I can bear.
Two hours seems to be a reasonable amount of time for your average movie. But when that means I have to be in a theater for two and a half hours because I have to view endless ads with Nicole Kidman telling me about the magic of movies at AMC (like I don't already know which theater I went to) then fuck off with that. I wanna watch a film and then hit the bar for at least an hour before last call.
The ads is also a big annoyance for me. Like I already pay almost €18 for a ticket, which in my opinion should be ad free. Knowing this I do sometimes just arrive 15 minutes late but it is silly you have to do that, and it messes with my general sense of punctuality.
That's been my solution to the problem as well. Another much more annoying thing for me though is all the trailers playing just before the movie - I always avoid trailers for movies I know I want to see, but then again I also feel that just a poster can reveal too much so my limit for spoilers is impossibly low lol