Movies are too fucking long these days imho

!!!! lmao @ dave tbh

When In Rome is only 91 minutes long but feels much, much longer.

Dinkytown flocked to the Varsity in the prewar years, when Fisher held "bank day" drawings for prizes such as new dishes, and sometimes even let patrons stay overnight in the cool air conditioning, which was provided by air pumped through water drawn from an underground well.

"Very few places had air conditioning in those days," says Beatrice Perper, one of Fisher's daughters, who worked the box office. "Many times in the summer, he left the theater open, so people could sleep there. He hired two people to stay and watch the theater. People used to bring whole families."

http://www.citypages.com/2005-03-09/arts/varsity-cheer/all

among the uninformed shit i've heard people say in my long career as a film academic is that until the 60s ppl didn't know when films started

is it time for the film equivalent of this thread?

this thread was a right laugh, but i've never seen a thread so become so totally de-railed.

but yeah movies.. they're *mental* long these days agreed. especially comedies.

movies I've seen recently that were the perfect length: Taken (think this was like 80-90 minutes?), Toy Story 3 (~100 minutes), and nothing else

Watched Wendy and Lucy for the second time a couple of nights ago. 75 minutes--perfect. (Generally I like long films, though.)

http://www.onlinecharttool.com/test/img_files/20101229154240.png

Okay, so I plotted the average length of the top ten box office films for each year. I know more data points would have been nicer, but I've only got so much free time.

I like examining unexamined assumptions ("films are longer these days") - turns out this one might be true!

even more amazing is just *how* short they were 10 years ago. 107 minutes!

Excellent work. "I like examining unexamined assumptions"--for the folks on ILB, let me say that Bill James couldn't have said it better himself.

We need a data-analysis expert here. Your graph is persuasive, but a couple of red flags I'd raise: 1) is 10 films a year enough to start drawing conclusions (especially 10 that aren't random--maybe hits are longer by nature), and 2) maybe 2004-2009 is a blip; if you eliminate the last five years, you could say the length didn't increase at all from 1979-2004.

I don't know. I play a grade 6 math teacher in real life, but this one's above my pay grade.

that graph is dominated by statistical noise

i dont mind long movies - if the movie is too long for itself thats another thing - like transformers 2 prob just shouldve been a commercial or whatever

xpost -- We could retitle it 'supernovae are brighter these days'

skewing results: 12-minute end credits for horseshit effects-laden stuff

no good comes of any thread where "meme" surfaces

― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, June 16, 2010 6:24 PM (6 months ago) Bookmark

The end-credits is a good point--wouldn't be surprised if they account for most of the seven-minute difference between '79 and '09. I'm often hanging around right till the end of the credits to get the name of some song that caught my ear, and they go on forever. It doesn't even have to be a film with lots of special effects, very few of which I see--it applies to all films.

http://img833.imageshack.us/img833/3725/chart1c.png

I have no idea what if anything I have learnt from this chart, but really I just wanted to see if I could web-scrape the data off IMDB, which I could, with 3 lines of Perl

(data is in a Google Docs spreadsheet here; some years have <50 rows of data because some movies didn't have a length showing up; data scraped from e.g. http://www.imdb.com/search/title?year=2010%2C2010&title_type=feature&sort=moviemeter%2Casc which uses imdb's own questionable "MovieMeter" ranking but the box office data gets pretty shaky the further back you go so eh)

looks about right to me. my guess is the average length hasn't changed that much, but there are currently (like in the last 5 years) a lot more 2.5 hour+ trashy movies.

So if that is about right then I dunno if it's more true to say that the 00s and the 60s had a lot of really long films or that the 70s and 80s had a lot of short films.

Anyway, I have a short attention span and grew up with 80s films, so if the plunge downwards right at the end means the trend is turning round again then I'm all for it.

(I don't trust the data here a whole bunch btw)

that imdb moviemeter thing is sketchy, but i'd be surprised if the top 50 were a particularly biased sample of successful mainstream movies. i can totally buy that there isn't a gross trend in running length. imo this thread inspired by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias although i agree that there are probably more really dumb long movies than there used to be.

i wouldn't trust any results based on a year that hasn't finished though, especially with award season to come, which will boost (usu. longer) oscar-type movies into the top 50.

the issue here, comparing the 1950s with the present, is b-movies, i.e. second features. they were shorter than the main feature because duh. but now we don't have b-movies so.

Would all those musical-overture segments (which I assume were included in running times) from the big prestige roadshow films from the '60s make a difference? Not sure if there were enough of them to matter, but they seemed to run two or three minutes.

Of course, those films were already three or four hours long, so probably not.

well we're in difficult territory with that. there is a question of whether you would have had to endure them when the film got rolled out into regular cinemas. i genuinely dk. but those films were relatively rare -- this is about whether your average programmer is longer now.

data doesn't matter. NO comedy/thriller/romance type movie that isn't some kind of visually stunning epic or intensely contemplative and/or suspenseful masterwork should EVER be over 120 minutes, and preferably not over 100 minutes. Whether there are more films like this than there used to be, all of them are too long.

otm

I bet that 90% of the films that check in at 150 minutes+ aspire to one or more of those things; how many actually achieve it, obviously many fewer.

This is actually a significant factor in my cinema going now. I refused to see Avatar because of the length. I always ask how long something is before agreeing to go unless it's a new Coen Bros or something on that level.

A four-hour Pauly Shore film? I'm guessing that's a pass for you.

# of very long movies (over 130 minutes), by decade:

1950s — 58
1960s — 121
1970s — 72
1980s — 55
1990s — 97
2000s — 112

# of very short movies (under 86 minutes), by decade:

1950s — 84
1960s — 48
1970s — 38
1980s — 26
1990s — 35
2000s — 13

(wanted to do a medium-length one for comparison purposes, but couldn't decide what range to use — there actually seem to be two separate frequency peaks within "medium-length", one in the mid-90s, another in the low 110s)

(all drawn from spacecadet's google spreadsheet data, in case that wasn't clear)

data doesn't matter. NO comedy/thriller/romance type movie that isn't some kind of visually stunning epic or intensely contemplative and/or suspenseful masterwork should EVER be over 120 minutes, and preferably not over 100 minutes. Whether there are more films like this than there used to be, all of them are too long.

― I can take a youtube that's seldom seen, flip it, now it's a meme (Hurting 2), Wednesday, December 29, 2010 5:13 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I bet that 90% of the films that check in at 150 minutes+ aspire to one or more of those things; how many actually achieve it, obviously many fewer.

― clemenza, Wednesday, December 29, 2010 5:18 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i think the premise of this thread is that that's not true. 2.5 hour action movies and 2+ hour comedies that obviously don't aspire to much are not huge outliers any more.

I upped it to 150 minutes before making that statement--I see few action films, unless it's something like Inception or The Dark Knight, both of which obviously have artistic aspirations, whether you think they get there or not. But you might be right, I honestly don't know.

More action films without artistic aspirations plz

On the basis of those two, I'd agree. I'd still prefer the aspirations, though, in hopes of lucking onto something like the second Spiderman or Batman films, both of which I liked a lot.

Hurting rlly consistently a foole this week

don't wanna get dragged into that people-showing-up-at-random-during-the-middle-of-films-at-the-cinema-in-the-olden-days argument again but check this out

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ksk66thANP1qzsbs8.jpg

it was a well known gimmick of Hitch's, don't think i've seen that poster before tho

IIRC that gimmick was used with Psycho only, because it was advertised as a Janet Leigh movie, and Hitchcock was afraid that people turning in late might miss her part of the movie.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2012/dec/12/is-the-hobbit-too-long

it's amazing how they made the bold creative decision to make it into three movies. really makes me excited for the results.

169 minutes! holy Christ.

All too many other potentially great movies, from Titanic to Out of Africa

stopped reading here

haha

This IS 40; 133 minutes for a comedy.

John Cleese going with the 'people rocked up in the middle of the film then left where they came in' line, which some ilx folk are/were skeptical about

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ch4L2nrWMAE3FJ8.jpg

What's he on about - his "parents' generation"? We used to do this all the time when I was a kid. This is how I watched The Meaning of Life and Life of Brian.

A 1:45 cut of Civil War would be better.

minute 45, right?