Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson stated on his podcast that Ari Aster’s “Disappointment Blvd” clocks in at 4 hours. This would surprise me considering the fact that I was hearing Aster has been told by A24 to snip it down to 3 hours.
I presume Lawson is basing his Intel on a year-old Aster interview in which he described his next movie to be a “4-hour nightmare comedy.” Of course, I would love nothing more than to have an unsnipped and uncompromised Aster movie released, but who are we kidding here? Its commercial prospects would be destroyed by that runtime.
Let’s of course remember that once upon a time Aster had a 4-hour version of “Midsommar,” and that movie was eventually molded into a 2 hour and 25 minute theatrical version. Eventually, Aster included a “director’s cut” in the blu-ray release which ran a few minutes shy of 3-hours.