Why movies are getting longer

Some arbitrary constraints are good.

How do you feel about long movies? (Photo by Drazen Zigic)

Kate and I went to see “Project Hail Mary” with some friends last weekend, and it’s really everything I want from a mainstream filmgoing experience: It’s funny, heartfelt, features a charismatic movie star, and has moments of real suspense and visual thrills. It’s based on a novel, but that fits it into the long Hollywood tradition of literary adaptations rather than the more recent fad of cinematic universes and endless sequels and prequels.

It’s also, at 156 minutes, really long.

The length felt particularly odd because there are several different moments before the actual ending when it felt like the film could have concluded on an emotionally satisfying note, but additional plot developments kept happening.

That’s also how I felt about “Marty Supreme,” another recent hit that was well-made and enjoyable but awfully long at 150 minutes, especially considering it’s a suspenseful sports comedy, not a generations-spanning epic. “Hoosiers,” “Rudy,” and “White Men Can’t Jump” are all under two hours. “The Karate Kid” is two hours and six minutes.

Most of my movie fan friends constantly complain about the length of contemporary films. A running bit on “The Rewatchables” podcast is calling out how much more economical filmmaking used to typically be, with exceptions that typically feature sprawling casts rather than just go on for a long time.

And while I began by talking about two very good movies that happen to be quite long, what’s truly remarkable about today’s movies is how long even dispensable films are — “The Housemaid” clocked in at 133 minutes, and “Crime 101” was 140! I love watching movies and I did enjoy both of those, but it kind of takes the fun out of fun-but-silly movies when they get so long. Who exactly was asking for two and a half hours of a “Den of Thieves” sequel?

And yet, I hesitate to posit that capitalism has completely broken down and forgotten to provide us with shorter films.

What I think has happened is that the market forces that used to strongly incentivize shorter movies have disappeared. As a result, we’re getting routine bloat (that younger audiences, accustomed to prestige TV and binge-watching, perhaps don’t mind) as there’s less and less pressure to make cuts.

Twentieth-century limits

Part of my broadly out of touch life is that my father is the screenwriter of several feature films and also worked on various projects that ultimately never got made, so I heard a lot about the late-20th-century movie industry and what kinds of notes creatives would get from producers and studios. My sense is that the biggest thing that’s changed is that distribution has become less of a chokepoint. Convincing theater owners to program your movie at all used to be a moderately difficult task, and one of the major functions of a big movie studio was developing and maintaining the connections to get their movies widely shown.

These days the theaters are more starved for content.

“Project Hail Mary” played on 4,000 screens last weekend — which is a lot — and the other wide releases were a horror sequel (“Ready or Not 2”), a cartoon for kids (“The Pout-Pout Fish”), and a Bollywood sequel (“Dhurandhar the Revenge”). The only movies that really linger in theaters these days are kid-oriented animated films.

When my dad’s first movie, “Fearless,” debuted in October of 1993, not only were multiple grownup movies opening widely at the same time (“Demolition Man,” “Judgment Night,” “Rudy,” and whatever “Mr. Wonderful” was), but “The Fugitive” was still showing on more than 1,000 screens in its 11th week.