e Long Movie and the Pursuit of E ciency

By Kaden Miller

CINEPHILES are notoriously hungry for lengthy films. You might’ve seen the countless memes about filmbros watching, say, a four-hour movie about a bird in an Asian war or thirsting for a threehour epic about the life and death of a crossing guard. While satirical, of course, many lengthy films are typically associated with being the film nerd’s territory – Seven Samurai is a darling of the budding film student, and War and Peace is famously adored by the same folks. Furthermore, long movies have the tendency to be derided by mainstream audiences – you’ve surely heard someone (perhaps yourself) gripe about how long a movie is and why they’re no longer going to watch it. Historically, though, that hasn’t always been the case: Gone With the Wind is, of course, one of the most cherished films of all time, especially amongst the older generations, and younger generations were equally enthralled by the three hour Avengers: Endgame . A common explanation for this is that audiences are “just different nowadays” and are too impatient for a lengthy spectacle. I find this to be a tired, nonsense explanation and I think you’ll agree – if you’re willing to sit through this article’s runtime. For the purpose of this examination, I’m going to use the two-hour film as the standard length, and draw the lines for “long” and “short” as thirty minutes above or below that.

The age-old “lack of patience” excuse was a bigger problem in the pre-streaming era, where watching a movie not only required viewers to surrender the runtime, but also the time it takes to make it to the theater and back again. In today’s streaming-dominated market, the mass availability of cinema makes it so much easier to simply select a shorter film if you have other things to do. Clearly, though, audiences don’t always spring for the shortest option when selecting a movie – four of the five highest grossing films of all time are over two hours and forty minutes.

What’s so different about these four films? We’ll come back to this.

Think about movies that trend in the opposite direction: features that run ninety minutes or less. These films are immediately more accessible to the audience – they don’t require as much of a time commitment – but clearly we don’t see studios exclusively sticking to the ninety-minute mark for their films. Four of the highest grossing films of 2022, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever , The Batman , Elvis , and Avatar: The Way of Water, are quite lengthy. Why? Sure, long movies do have the tendency to scare away audiences because of the time they require, but there are still plenty of folks who view movies as a special treat to be savored and don’t necessarily want a film that’s finished just over an hour after they started it. Even in a market dominated by streaming, viewers consciously choose a movie instead of an episode of television when they’re looking for a lengthier experience to sink their teeth into.

This isn’t what I consider to be the ultimate explanation for why audiences seem to prefer short movies to long ones, though. For that, we need not consider simply the runtime of the film, but also how the creators use the time that they’re allotted. I don’t believe that audiences in the past or present have ever had a true vendetta against long movies, but they do hate ones that drag on without making meaningful progress or adding anything to the enjoyment of the film. This can be summed up as the efficiency of each film, which is what ultimately matters when discussing runtime.

I’m going to define the efficiency of a film as squeezing the most quality material into the tightest runtime it can. I’m being purposely vague by using the descriptor “quality material” because this can be anything enjoyable from a film – action, suspense, romance, good performances, an interesting plot, stunning composition or cinematography – anything that audiences (average or cinephile) would enjoy seeing. The distinction between an efficient film and a short one must be crystal clear: a short movie simply has a low runtime, but an efficient film makes use of whatever it has, regardless of length. There are a multitude of examples you could pull to demonstrate cinematic efficiency, because I believe it to be a cornerstone of every, well, “good” movie ever made. Focus briefly on the work of Ernst Lubitsch, who seemed to have an obsession with making the most efficient film possible. None of his eight most popular films clear 112 minutes, and each one moves strikingly fast and fits so much into frame.

The Shop Around the Corner , one of his most well-known, moves so elegantly through its 99 minutes that they breeze by; even when there isn’t a major plot point occurring, there’s something to keep your mind occupied and engaged. Speilberg’s Duel , a similarly efficient film, is set almost entirely on a desolate highway which chooses tension as its method of engagement and never lets the suspense decline.

Importantly, this does not only apply to short movies. I mentioned the four of the five highest grossing films were lengthy, but they all use their runtimes efficiently, and that’s what keeps viewers engaged. Both Avatar films, along with Titanic , use their runtimes effectively to prevent a lull in pace, and Avengers: Endgame is chock-full of superhero drama and action that was monstrously popular. Gone With the Wind , despite how troubling many aspects of it are, is efficient at its colossal 221-minute runtime because of everything it packs into it – luscious visuals, multiple all-timer performances, and a plot of epic scale. To put it plainly, the amount of quality material must stay at a constant ratio to the length of the film, and when it doesn’t, the film becomes a redundant drag. Note how a movie being boring doesn’t usually relate to the runtime itself – there are 90-minute movies that are immensely boring, too – which proves that a more brief length does not correlate to the entertainment gained from a film. If a movie is boring, it is just as boring at three hours as it is in just over one. So, if the length of a movie doesn’t matter in comparison to efficiency, why do many people still disparage longer films? I assume that audiences may think that longer films have a high - er propensity to be boring; misusing a lengthy runtime has certainly plagued films in the past. Or, alternatively, the widespread availability of films on streaming platforms may just inspire shorter choices, because there are countless 90-minute films to choose from. Some platforms have attempted to combat this by breaking lengthy movies into a miniseries of equally long episodes, like Netflix’s extended version of The Hateful Eight , though I don’t think this will make an ultimate difference in the consumption of the medium, and neither will any other method of breaking a film into chunks. Nothing will change how the film was made, and therefore neither does it change its efficiency. None of what I’ve described, though, will kill the long movie. So, cinephile, don’t fret: there will always be long stories to be told and filmmakers willing to tell them. As long as we have short movies, we will have long ones. Let’s just hope they’re efficient.