There is so little time, and the movies are getting longer and longer

In Variety and Entertainment Weekly's interviews with anonymous voters ahead of the Oscars this month, some complained that the Best Picture nominees were too long to watch. "It took me five days to watch Brutalist," one said. "I didn't finish the first Dune, so I didn't want to spend three hours watching this one," another said.

In terms of length, "Brutalist" with 215 minutes and "Dune 2" with 167 minutes ranked first and second respectively among the ten nominees for this year's Oscar Best Picture. The remaining eight films are not short either, with an average length of 138.8 minutes, which is more than two hours.

Brutalism is 215 minutes long, more than three hours long.

Back in the 1980s, the average length of Hollywood movies was between 100 and 120 minutes; in the 1990s, it was lengthened to 110 to 130 minutes; and after 2000, it was further lengthened to 120 to 150 minutes.

The phenomenon of movies getting longer and longer is not unique to Hollywood. Chinese movies are no exception. This year's Spring Festival movie, including "Nezha: The Devil Boy Conquers the Dragon King", "Detective Chinatown 1900", "Investiture of the Gods Part II: The Battle of Xiqi", "The Legend of the Condor Heroes: The Greatest Hero", "Operation Jiaolong" and "Boonie Bears: Reboot", had an average running time of 137 minutes, setting a new record for the longest average running time of Spring Festival movies in Chinese film history.

Poster of Nezha: The Devil Boy Conquers the Dragon King

So, what impact will the increase in movie length have on the box office? Tom Brueggemann, a senior media person in the American film industry, recently wrote an article pointing out that this phenomenon will only make the current weak film market more difficult and even fall into a vicious cycle. Brueggemann has worked in film distribution and as a reporter. He has also been writing box office analysis articles on the film and television portal IndieWire for many years. After the beginning of this year, he was unfortunately laid off and transformed into a self-media creator, continuing to output his industry and market observations on Hollywood films.

Brugman pointed out that the weakness of the North American film market is due to obvious factors, such as the so-called shortage of new films and the development of streaming media, which has led to a shorter and shorter screening window for new films. The increase in the length of films is also a hidden but not negligible problem. Nowadays, it is common for films to be over two hours long. When you add in the time spent going to and from the theater and the odd hours before and after the screening, it is common to spend three hours watching a movie.

In the past, many American families used to watch a movie after dinner on weekends, but this has become unsustainable due to the above reasons. Many people simply choose to watch streaming works on TV at home. Anyway, with the remote control in hand, they can freely control when to stop watching. Even if they don’t finish watching on the same day, they can continue watching the next day.

Dune 2 is 167 minutes long, more than 2 hours

It is a general trend that movies are getting longer and longer, and it is difficult to change in the future. However, in addition to the film itself, the audience now has to endure a long series of advertisements and trailers before the main film begins, which means that they have to spend more time in the theater. In February this year, Martin Looney, a congressman from Connecticut, proposed legislation to force theaters to mark the specific time when the main film starts in advance, so that the audience who do not want to watch advertisements and trailers will not waste more than 20 minutes or even half an hour sitting in their seats.

At about the same time, a lawyer named Abhishek in Bangalore, India, sued the cinema in the Consumer Council Arbitration Tribunal because he was forced to watch a 25-minute advertisement and trailer when watching the movie "Marshal Manekshaw" at the local PVR INOX cinema chain on December 26, 2023. The reason was that when buying the ticket, he was told that the film would start at 4:05 and end at 6:30, but the film was delayed until 7 o'clock due to the above reasons. The lawyer believed that this move was suspected of fraud and also affected his work schedule. In the end, the court ruled that the cinema lost the case and needed to compensate the plaintiff 20,000 rupees, about 1,700 yuan.

However, as Tom Brugman pointed out, the cinema industry, which has suffered from the impact of streaming media and the loss of customers, will earn a lot of money by showing these ads and trailers, so this practice may not change in the future. There was a cinema chain called Arclight in the United States, which mainly attracted customers with non-episodic ads and showed fewer trailers than its peers. But Arclight unfortunately went bankrupt during the epidemic. In this way, it is very difficult to reform the cinema, and the only way is to force the audience who hates going to the cinema to watch movies, which is increasingly time-consuming, to choose to stay away from the cinema.

In addition, modern people's obsession with mobile phones is no longer comparable to the situation a dozen or twenty years ago. Many people find it unbearable and uncomfortable not to check their mobile phones for a few minutes or ten minutes. This has the same side effect from two perspectives: one is that the audience who hates people in the cinema turning on the screen to watch mobile phones chooses to go to the cinema less often and be less disturbed when watching movies; the other is that people who can't help but check their phones don't have to restrain themselves when the addiction comes, so they simply go to the cinema less often.

At first glance, these situations may seem trivial and do not seem to be the key factors that can affect the ups and downs of Hollywood box office by hundreds of millions of dollars. However, it is undeniable that these are part of the subtle changes in modern people's movie-watching behavior, and the most direct force that determines the box office of a movie is of course the human factor.