Among his many great and useful quotes, one of Roger Ebert’s best observations was this: “no good movie is ever too long and no bad movie is ever short enough.” And it’s true. It doesn’t matter if a movie is eighty minutes or four hours, if it’s good you’ll either be satisfied or want more of it, if it’s bad you want it over as soon as possible.
 |
Lately there’s been a lot of talk about movie lengths (it was even the subject of the most attention Killers of the Flower Moon got Oscar night); but not about short bad movies, about long good ones. There has been a semi-revival lately of long movies -long as in two and a half to three and a half hours, and with it has come significant criticism from some viewers. But it’s not criticism directed at the movies themselves for their own contents, which would be perfectly reasonable. In spite of my broad statement just now on “good long movies”, there are obviously solid, reasoned, good-faith criticisms of any number of these, from Killers of the Flower Moon to Avatar: The Way of Water to even something as universally beloved as Beau is Afraid. But it has become more and more common to see these movie’s lengths levelled against them as criticism itself -as though there is a particular time limit a movie is allowed to be and once it surpasses that it magically starts to be boring.
And yet in spite of these scattered criticisms, long movies have been doing well financially. Avatar: The Way of Water is one of the highest-grossing movies ever, Oppenheimer was one of the biggest hits of last year, currently Dune: Part Two is doing exceptionally well in theatres. All of these are movies that hover around the three hour mark, either a little below or a little over. Clearly for a lot of general audiences, it’s not that big a deal. So why do we seem to be talking so much about it lately? After all there have been long movies, and in the mainstream, as far back as the art form itself.
 |
Probably the earliest popular long movies that people remember are unfortunately those by D.W. Griffith, specifically The Birth of a Nation and to a lesser extent Intolerance, each of which are over three hours long even with a few reels of the latter missing. Outside of the United States though, you had Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria -which pre-dated Birth of a Nation by a year and is sometimes regarded as the first, or at least earliest surviving epic film. Though not as big a hit as Griffith’s films, it was successful enough to get a private screening at the White House. There were a couple more epics from Europe during the silent era: Metropolis and a much-cut version of Napoleon -Abel Gance’s original ran five and a half hours. But the long movie subsequently diminished in popularity during the height of Hollywood’s studio era in the 1930s and 40s -with one prominent exception: Gone With the Wind at just shy of four hours, still adjusted for inflation the highest grossing movie of all time. But Gone With the Wind didn’t spawn any real immediate imitators in terms of scale and length -the typical runtime for this era remained between seventy minutes and two hours. Generally it seemed agreed upon that unless a movie was particularly important it wouldn’t be made at such a length. The next major movie to come even close to three hours was The Best Years of Our Lives (about ten minutes short) in 1946 -and it was made specifically to be the great American post-war movie.
It wasn’t until the mid-1950s when the long movie took off again. Cecil B. DeMille is probably the man to credit, first pushing the runtime envelope with the two and a half hour The Greatest Show on Earth in 1952 -which went on to win Best Picture; before his greatest hit The Ten Commandments in 1956, which revived the genre of the Biblical epic and became one of the highest grossing movies of the decade. It was three hours and forty minutes. And so began a decade and a half of fairly consistent long Hollywood movies -usually historical or Biblical epics, later adaptations of Broadway musicals, that would be highly successful with audiences. And of course there are a lot of reasons for this beyond the mere length: high budgets, star-studded casts, and distribution methods of the road-show picture -all of which were designed to compete with the apparent threat of television. And of course many of these movies went on to not only be successful during that era but highly regarded touchstones of film history, from Ben-Hur to Lawrence of Arabia to The Sound of Music.
Of course there’s one characteristic of all of these movies that some segment of modern audiences decrying the long film seem to fully appreciate and are in favour of a return to. As far back as The Birth of a Nation long movies incorporated an intermission -a tradition borrowed of course from theatre. And for especially theatrical movies, like those big Broadway-based musicals, it worked. But they are also a bit odd when you think about it, and they fell out of favour at the end of the 1960s -a casualty of the New Hollywood looking to get as far away from the old conventions as possible. After about the mid-70s almost no American-produced movies carried an intermission anymore, regardless of length. Most people now are only familiar with them as they appear on home video releases of these older movies -along with the overture that opens up the film and the Cinemascope aspect ratio. And most people like myself probably skip through them, the movies being long enough without up to five minutes of empty space. When these released in the theatres I expect it was longer. And so the experience of a cinema intermission is pretty foreign to most western audiences (some cultures like India with their very long Bollywood movies still make use of them though).
 |
Yet I and I think most cinema lovers would be open to a return of the intermission so long as it was the filmmaker’s creative or aesthetic intent. But a common refrain seems to be that intermissions should simply be added to long movies arbitrarily -which doesn’t work. First off, because an intermission that isn’t designed will never not feel intrusive. I noticed this recently re-watching the Lord of the Rings extended editions, which are each split across two discs and the break-point on all three feels awkward. Musical movies (already typically split into two acts) and those older epics that were designed with the intermission in mind made it feel, if not seamless, at least organic. But where would you put the intermission in a movie like Avatar: The Way of Water or Babylon or John Wick Chapter Four (a movie that seemingly charges along for three hours without any rest). These are conventionally structured three-act films -there isn’t a place at the midway point where it would structurally or tonally fit.
The main point though against this theoretical tactic is the disrespect it applies to the filmmaker and editor, who constructed the movie the way it is for a reason. It would essentially be the theatres or the production house taking the film out of the filmmaker’s hands and messing with it -it’s not a good idea when it happens in other respects to a movie, nor is it a good idea here. When you enter into a movie you are consensually taking in the vision that is being offered to you; an intrusive intermission where it was never meant to be is an insulting aberration on that.
 |
And I understand this sounds pretentious to some, even if it is merely the idea of an artist having control of their work. But understand that a director having the right to make their movie as long as they want, with or without any pause doesn’t mean it will be good all the time. In fact one of the most famous three hour auteur epics, Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate is not -and arguably took down a whole cinematic movement as a result. But that movement, which reclaimed the long film from the limited domains of musicals and Biblical or exotic historical epics and for the first time did away with the intermission tradition, included the like of the first two Godfather movies, Patton, Nashville, even the Lindsay Anderson satirical comedy O Lucky Man! The 80s and 90s, though it had left that period behind, still allowed for filmmakers with the right resources and trust to make their lengthy movies as they saw fit. For some, like Sergio Leone, a movie like Once Upon a Time in America, with its sprawling near four hour runtime, could come to represent a sense of defining artistic statement. You can see it also in Warren Beatty’s Reds, Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff, up to Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, Oliver Stone’s JFK, and even Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. There was room too for a revival of the exotic historical epic in films such as Gandhi, Out of Africa, of course David Lean’s last film A Passage to India, Dances With Wolves, The English Patient; yet something like Amadeus would expand on this form and hone in less on breadth of visual scope and scenery and more on character drama. And then Titanic thirteen years later would combine these with new insights and technology to completely revolutionize the genre.
Most if not all of these were big hits not in spite of but in some part owing to their length. A long movie denoted a certain importance, a certain prestige -and it was certainly distinct from television. It was like the sporting event or concert of the film medium -except far less expensive. And it remains so. James Cameron, in response to a weird viral concern about when to pee during his last movie, confidently said people could go whenever they want and catch what they missed on their second viewing -cocky though it was, he knew from experience what would bear out; indeed people were seeing The Way of Water multiple times in theatres. Why then, if length and a lack of an intermission made no difference before, does it suddenly make one now?
 |
I have my own theory tied to both the relative dearth of long movies in the last couple decades and, that old villain, the rise of streaming. For many people my age and younger the only long movies widely known and with a palpable cultural footprint are the Lord of the Rings trilogy which, when theatrically released were each three hours or in the case of The Return of the King, three and a half hours long. Considered by many the definitive versions, the extended editions each ran up to an hour longer. And perhaps I can’t speak for younger audiences, born after the hype had died down, but I can attest from personal experience and observation that my generation has watched and re-watched those movies more times than anything else. But for most of us (and almost all of the under-twenty crowd) that has primarily been an at-home experience, surrounded by distractions and with the ability to pause or take a break from the immersion, which is almost certainly done. It’s the case any time your friends talk about a movie or TV marathon -it could sound like a slog, but the reality is that it’s broken up, sometimes with minimal engagement with the media to begin with. And given so few long movies came out of the industry for a good while after Lord of the Rings, and certainly not any that the kids of a generation were going to see, that sustained movie-watching experience didn’t settle with a lot of younger millennials and Gen-Z. In its place, the advent of streaming took root, and Netflix’s for a time popular binge model -which encouraged lengthy viewing habits but only with the viewer in control. Submitting to a movie’s own pace meant not being in control, it meant letting the movie take you somewhere on its own.
And I think its this ecosystem that is to blame more than the common refrain culprits of ‘kids having low attention spans’ or ‘weak bladders’. In addition to streaming you have the rise of YouTube and TikTok and short form snippets that have trained especially young people to prefer their entertainment in shorter, efficient bursts. Even when they like a movie that’s long, in the theatre they can’t sit with it in patience -and that’s where the intermission argument comes up, less as a means of honouring an old tradition or artful storytelling device, and more so to make going to the theatre feel like just watching something at home.
 |
Yet why then are we now seeing long movies become hits again? At least some of these same audiences who decry movie lengths must be coming to see them regardless. I wager some of it at least is due to the impending failure of the streaming model -it’s been on a slow implosion the last few years on account of buy-outs, price hikes, crackdowns on password sharing, and just deficits across the board. Even Netflix, which seems to be riding it out, still stubbornly refuses to let go of the binge model that is long past expired in terms of general viewing preference. Streaming is starting to lose steam at the same time the movies seem to be getting it back. With an influx of way too many options algorithmically programmed on streaming services, it may be easier just to commit to the new film in town.
It must also quite obviously be that this rise in critiques of long runtimes is an exaggerated and manufactured thing; that those voices online, as in so many other discourses, are a minority that just happen to correspond with an easy and shallow target. Generally, people prefer short things to long things, ‘long’ is often popularly equated with ‘boring’ -it’s a convenient way of voicing dissatisfaction without having to put up any argument of substance. And in spite of the prevalence of such a complaint, it’s not like movies are actually getting longer -it’s just that several that have have attained a higher profile than in years past. We still get plenty of two hour or less movies each year -my favourite from 2023, Past Lives, was only an hour and a half. It’s not a long movie takeover, it’s not even a 1960s style industry prevalence yet.
 |
But it is comparable and interesting that after many years where long movies were the Hollywood outsiders they are back in the limelight. And it’s because the length is secondary to the appeal. At the end of the day it just comes down to some of these movies being really good movies, and really good in a way that general audiences can gravitate towards. People went to see The Way of Water, Oppenheimer, and Dune Part Two because of their scope and their spectacle. Because of things like name-brand recognition for James Cameron, Christopher Nolan, even Denis Villeneuve; popular concepts and storytelling devices, in the case of two of them an immersion in grand sci-fi worlds rendered with intense effectiveness. And also good word of mouth from others who’d seen the movies, making them into those kinds of events so rare to see outside the established franchise machine (a machine that hasn’t itself delivered so well in recent history). And who’s ever heard of an hour and a half event?
I think the general public understands that and so doesn’t care if it means sitting in a seat for three hours so long as they experience these major movies on the scale they are envisioned as. And of course not every filmmaker has the pull of Cameron, Nolan, or Scorsese to get away with this -Beau is Afraid was a flop. But it’s clear the appetite is there for big creative movies, length be damned. Enough so that a sensible industry might take a few risks. Not this industry of course, but a sensible one.
Regardless, I think we will be seeing more long movies in the coming years, as what artists who can will exercise their freedoms. Some of them will even be hits -not because of their length but because audiences aren’t so shallow as to be entirely put off by them, no matter what the discourse suggests. And that’s a great thing for the survival of this multi-faceted and versatile art form.
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/JordanBosch
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jordan_D_Bosch
Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/jbosch
Comments
Post a Comment