Yes, Movies Are Getting Longer

If you love movies, if you talk with people about movies, or if, like me, you write and think about them for a living, you have no doubt heard this question in the last few years:

“Why are movies so much longer now?”

Before you can attempt to answer that question, though, you need to figure out: Are they really getting longer? Or is that just something anecdotal, and perhaps inaccurate? After all, our attention spans are shorter than ever. People’s brains have grown accustomed to consuming online videos that run seconds or maybe minutes, not hours. Movies could be exactly the same as they’ve always been, and it’s us who has changed.

Maybe not. Film industry analyst Stephen Follows “crunched the running times of 36,431 movies” for The Town podcast, and found some interesting data. If you look at every film produced in the last few decades, Follows says, “the average running time has barely changed in decades. It has hovered around 100 to 103 minutes since the 1980s. In 2024, the average film was 103.6 minutes long.”

But that’s the average of everything. If you look at just “wide theatrical releases (the films that open in hundreds or thousands of cinemas across North America)” then you see something else. Those movies alone “averaged 106 minutes in the early 2000s.” But by the current decade, “that figure had risen to 114 minutes.”

“This means,” he adds, “that if you’re a regular cinemagoer, you are now routinely sitting through films that are around ten minutes longer than they were a generation ago.”

READ MORE: The Longest Films Ever Made

I encourage to look at all the data, because it is quite interesting, and it includes some charts that are worth inspecting. Follows also discovered that blockbuster-budgeted movies are getting especially longer in comparison with other genres, and that the percentage of wide releases that run less than 90 minutes has shrunk considerably in the last 40 years. (“In the 1980s, roughly 13% of wide releases ran under 90 minutes. In the 2020s, that’s down to 7%.”)

What does this mean? Well, it means in large part if you feel like movies are longer these days, there is some data to back that up. (The research also notes that on top of everything else, pre-shows ads and trailers before movies have also gotten longer, distending the theatrical experience even further.)

But if all of this is true, I would like to point out: It’s not necessarily a bad thing. Sure, a long movie might be boring. It might also be extremely involving. If you want shorter films, if you want a couple of quick laughs, you can get that from the gadget in your pocket that you can never drop on the floor or you’ll crack the screen and breaker the port that charges it.

From my perspective, longer movies are often a selling point. In much the same way that cinema responded to the advent of television by introducing sweeping epics (and wider and larger format screens) to combat the competition of the small screen in moviegoers’ homes, one way films can stand out from an entertainment landscape filled with TikTok and Instagram and any number of online video platforms is by giving you a bigger, longer, uninterrupted, distraction-free experience than you’re gonna get scrolling social media.

That’s perhaps a subject for another study. Personally, I continue to subscribe to the Roger Ebert theory that no good movie is long enough and no bad movie is short enough.