What should be an ideal runtime? This question never gets old, but according to a recent survey we can see that, most people voted for 92 mins being a perfect showtime, and only 2% said 2.5 hr long movies are preferred by them.
Now if we go back in time, we’ll see most of the huge grossing movies such as “Titanic” “Endgame” all of them are 3 hrs long, and nobody complained about it, because of its execution and cut throat storyline.
But, in recent times with the increasing amount of commercial movies the runtime has been decreased to 118 mins.
Commercial movies are absolutely no-brainers, you don’t have to invest your brain juice to understand anything, and because the number of commercial movies and web series which averagely consists of 6 episodes and each one of them are 24 mins long, the attention span of the viewers are decreasing.
But, on the other hand if we look into Scorsese’s recent movie “Killers Of The Flower Moon” then we’ll understand that the hype for long good movies is not gone.
The Oscar winner “Oppenheimer” the runtime is over 2 hrs and same goes for “Dune Part Two”.
The new age “Gen Z”s are having the attention span of a tik tok, where they enjoy content which will give them a quick dopamine boost. If we look into the nature of their media usage we’ll see that over 6 hrs they spend on phones and the majority of time they are scrolling instagram reels or YouTube Shorts.
Scorsese in an interview said that if one can watch tv for over 4 hrs, Theaters for 3.5 hrs, then what’s wrong with cinema? Have some respect for it as well.
Honestly, his statement is true, cinema is a form of art which is expressed via audio and visual aids, with the advancement of technology vfx, editing and camera works are developing, and to express a good plotline one needs to set a whole background and then introduce characters, which takes time.
Although audiences voted for 92 mins but, if we look closely, we can observe that people are actually very happy with long movies, movies such as “Titanic”, “Endgame” , “Avatar” all of them are long movies, but viewers have enjoyed them to the fullest. Movies like “La La Land” , “Shutter Island” , “The Pianist”, “Schindler’s List” all of them are now cult classics which left an Irreplaceable mark in the mind of the audience.
Just because they got the “PERFECT” runtime they deserved.
