Movies are definitely getting longer these days. “Avatar: The Way of Water,” “Babylon,” “Dune,” The Batman,” “Oppenheimer” and “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning” all flirted, or were over 3 hours in length.
It used to be an unwritten rule, for many moviegoers, that a film should be anywhere between 90 to 120 minutes — much shorter, and you don't get your money's worth. Much longer, and you start getting restless. We've been trained to expect two hours. However, not anymore, and I’m all here for it.
As Roger Ebert once said “No good movie is too long, and no bad movie is short enough.”
It is then great to see Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which is 3.5 hours, aiming for an opening weekend of as high as $30 million. However, some audiences do seem phased by the length, and there have been complaints about it.
During a recent interview, published yesterday, with the Hindustan Times, Scorsese defended the lengthy run-time. “People say it’s three hours, but come on, you can sit in front of the TV and watch something for five hours,” he said. “Also, there are many people who watch theater for 3.5 hours. There are real actors on stage, you can’t get up and walk around. You give it that respect. Give cinema some respect.”
When considering a single movie that breaks the sacred 120-minute barrier, there’s hope that it will use its runtime to take its time and build a world that absorbs you, takes you out of your current reality. If the film accomplishes what it sets out to do, you could even come out of it transformed, in a state of pure bliss.
“The Godfather: Part Two” (212 minutes), “Fanny and Alexander” (312 minutes) and “Shoah” (526 minutes) are examples of long films that I can’t imagine cutting a single frame of.
More recently, Scorsese’s “The Irishman” boldly went on for 210 minutes, some modern audiences believed it was perfect, whereas others predictably complained about the length. It didn’t help that a majority of the people who did watch “The Irishman” did so by streaming it on Netflix. Home viewing of 3+ hour movie is a much more daunting task, with distractions all around you.
Maybe we’ve underestimated the attention spans of modern-day audiences, the fervent binge-watching world we live in has maybe made them more willing to watch a 3-hour movie. I just hope these same audiences don’t mistake the movie theatre for their living rooms and start taking out their brightly-lit phones.
The best advice one can be given before entering their local Theater for “Killers of the Flower Moon” is to make sure not to buy an extra large soda beforehand.
"The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder." - Alfred Hitchcock
There's a lot of talent. Julianne Moore, Elle Fanning, Josh Hartnett, Emma Thompson, Sally Hawkins, Danny Huston, Robert Aramayo and Chloe Pirrie will all be part of the sprawling ensemble.