For what it’s worth, “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” has been getting positive test-screening reactions.
A few insider accounts have been hearing the same thing. We can take this intel with a grain of salt or it could turn out to be accurate. Who knows. What I do know is that the last cut screened was 2 hours 45 minutes … and TheMovieDB now has the same runtime listed. It’s not been made official by Lionsgate.
I didn’t like the last few Hunger Games. However, the first two were good and “Catching Fire” was the best of the lot. Francis Lawrence directed the last three and he’s back at the helm for ‘Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.’
"The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder." - Alfred Hitchcock
Is it just me or are movies getting longer these days? It seems 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.
Some of the more recent studio movies to have surpassed the 150 minute mark, and beyond, include “Oppenheimer”, “Beau is Afraid,” ‘Mission: Impossible 7,’ “John Wick 4,” and “Guardians of the Galaxy 3.” There’s also Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” coming in October, that one clocks in at 3 hours 30 minutes. Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” sequel is also rumoured to be around 3 hours.
Of course, this isn’t a complaint. As Roger Ebert once said “No good movie is too long, and no bad movie is short enough.”
Maybe we’ve underestimated the attention spans of modern-day audiences, the fervent binge-watching world we live in has possibly made them more willing to watch a 3-hour movie. I just hope these same audiences don’t mistake the cinema for their living rooms and take out their brightly-lit phones in the theater.
‘Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes’ hits theaters on November 17th, 2023.
Criterion's December lineup has some great additions to the library, but the title that jumped out at me is Werner Herzog's "Grizzly Man," which officially joins the Collection on December 8.