Neil Calloway wonders why every film has to be so long now…
With the rumour that Justice League is going to clock in at just shy of three hours, it’s time to ask when did movies start getting really long?
Of course, there have always been long movies, but back then films came with an intermission, now we’re expected to sit through 170 minutes with no respite. There are a couple of reasons for this, I reckon. Though Zack Snyder has denied the movie will be that long, it sounds about right.
One is that with franchise films, each instalment has to be bigger and better, both metaphorically and literally. Everyone wants more action sequences than the last, and everyone wants more characters, too, which is where the second reason comes in.
Every actor wants to be the lead in a film and to receive top billing, but that’s hard with a movie like Justice League, so they’ll demand the same number of lines as their co-stars; if Batman gets a cool fight scene, you better believe Superman’s agent is demanding that he gets the same thing.
Currently, I can sit on my sofa and watch an almost unlimited amount of entertainment; for the studios to get the average viewer to go to the cinema, with ever-increasing ticket prices, they’re going to need something big, and big means more spectacle, more action, and that inevitably leads to a longer running time. Why pay a small fortune to see a film that’s only 90 minutes long?
Technically, too, it’s now easier for cinemas to show longer films; the projectionist now no longer has to change reels every ten minutes, the cost of striking prints doesn’t come into the equation any more; it’s all on a Digital Cinema Package that isn’t going to get bigger or smaller in size if your film is 90 minutes or 180 minutes long.
In one of his books on screenwriting, William Goldman quotes his sometime collaborator George Roy Hill, who directed Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and won an Oscar for The Sting – “If you can’t tell your story in an hour fifty, you better be David Lean.” Even the biggest Zack Snyder fan has to concede he’s no David Lean.
And that’s the main problem with long films; it is rare that they couldn’t be improved without a bit of trimming here and there. The Phantom Menace is ten minutes longer than the original Star Wars film; which do you prefer? Personally I could have lived my whole life without ever hearing about midi-chlorians and not been any worse off. It is worth noting, however, that Battlefield Earth is shorter than them both so shorter does not means better, of course, but epic length does not necessarily equal epic quality. The longer a film is, the higher the chance that a few bum notes will be hit, that the story will get too bloated, the dialogue too clunky.
Justice League‘s length alone isn’t something to worry about, but I’d rather see a good film that’s an hour and a half long than one that’s almost three hours.
Neil Calloway is a pub quiz extraordinaire and Top Gun obsessive. Check back here every Sunday for future instalments.
Originally published April 2, 2017. Updated April 16, 2018.
