US research suggests that 92 minutes is the optimum length for a film. But I have sat through long films that felt short and short films that felt buttock-annihilatingly long.
Excerpt:
I can only say I have taken on films of buttock-annihilating, bladder-stress-testing massiveness. Bela Tarr’s mysterious black-and-white Hungarian meisterwerk Sátántangó weighs in at 439 minutes and if you’re already trying to divide that by 60 in your head and work out how many hours it is, then forget it, you’re too much of a lightweight. And only a lightweight wants loo breaks or food breaks. The original uncut version of Erich Von Stroheim’s silent 1924 masterpiece Greed went on “all day” at its single screening for awestruck critics and aghast executives, with the master himself reportedly sitting at the back scowling at anyone who dared ducking out to visit the restroom.
That said, an hour and a half isn’t a bad proportion. My late predecessor Derek Malcolm told me that 10% can be cut out of any film, no matter how long it is, and then 10% of that, and again, so that a film – like Zeno’s arrow – approaches a sublime existential state of brevity. In truth, there’s something to be said for the 92-minute idea. Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter is 92 minutes. So is Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata, Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday, Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice, Anthony Mann’s Winchester ’73, Pete Docter’s Monsters, Inc, and Kevin Smith’s Clerks.
I’m wary of any feature film around 90 minutes. That’s typically the minimum length for a feature film, so it makes me wonder how much they stretched their story to achieve that. However, if a movie is like 75-84 minutes, I tend to think something like, “oh they didn’t care about reaching the minimum. They told their story without trying to stretch it.”
105-120 minutes is the sweet spot I think.
Anything over two hours and I start thinking, “this better be good”
Interesting approach! Kind of depends on the era, it may be that they had to squash their story to get to 90…
I haven’t noticed any drop off in quality but haven’t been looking for it I have to admit. This graph is interesting but 8 years out of date.
2h20 is probably my cut off for one sitting of films that aren’t amazingly good. When I was young I was a lot more relaxed and up for super long films but not so much now.
I do watch a lot of B movies, which has probably led to this bias. I think films needed to be 90 minutes for a theatrical release back in the 80s.
That makes sense. I was thinking of the 1950s.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The truth hit me just as the house lights were starting to dim and that spasm of unease came back into my mind reading about the new US research survey that suggests that 92 minutes is the “perfect” length for a film.
Bela Tarr’s mysterious black-and-white Hungarian meisterwerk Sátántangó weighs in at 439 minutes and if you’re already trying to divide that by 60 in your head and work out how many hours it is, then forget it, you’re too much of a lightweight.
The original uncut version of Erich Von Stroheim’s silent 1924 masterpiece Greed went on “all day” at its single screening for awestruck critics and aghast executives, with the master himself reportedly sitting at the back scowling at anyone who dared ducking out to visit the restroom.
So is Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata, Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday, Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice, Anthony Mann’s Winchester ’73, Pete Docter’s Monsters, Inc, and Kevin Smith’s Clerks.
Storytelling discipline and clarity in feature film-making used to mean that the hour-and-half-to-two hour benchmark got a three-act narrative across with efficiency and force and theatre managers loved it because they could schedule many separate performances a day.
Now, perhaps, the primacy of streamers and binge-watching means in theory that people are ready for longer films (though perhaps not in the theatre).
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I can still remember sitting down to Theo Angelopoulos’s legendary epic film The Travelling Players and noting that it was 222 minutes long and thinking … sure, cool, two hours and twenty-two minutes, tiny bit on the long side, OK, nothing I can’t handle.
Math is hard for the guardian apparently.
I found that pretty relatable though right? I think most of us have made that mistake at some point!
