Our attention spans are getting shorter. So why are movies getting longer?
Lesson summary
Hi there everyone, it’s Jeff and this is Plain English, where we help you upgrade your English with current events and trending topics. This is lesson number 626, so that means you can find the full lesson content, including the free transcripts, at PlainEnglish.com/626.
Coming up today: movies are getting longer. Hit movies are ten percent longer than they were twenty years ago—and fifty percent longer than they were in the 1930s. But our attention spans in the age of TikTok, reels, short video—our attention spans are shorter than ever. So why are movies bucking the trend ? We’ll explore that in today’s main story.
In the second half of the lesson, I’ll show you what it means to have the upper hand. We also have a quote of the week for you, so listen up for that.
Now in honor of today’s topic, I could have made this episode three hours long, like some hit movies are. But I decided not to do that—you’re welcome. Instead, we’ll just talk about why movies are now, more than ever, three hours long. Let’s get going.
Why movies are getting longer
“Brevity is the soul of wit.” It’s a famous quote in English by Oscar Wilde. “Brevity” means “shortness.” Any good editor knows that the best way to improve a draft is to reduce its length. That goes for articles, books, podcasts, and other creative endeavors—even movies.
This is sometimes hard for creators to accept. Creators always think that every single word they (we?) write is essential. So while some of us know that “brevity is the soul of wit,” it’s still hard to cut our own words.
That brings us to today’s topic: movies are getting longer and longer . But audiences, critics, theaters, and producers all want them to be shorter.
Let’s start with audiences. Our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. Most moviegoers say they like short, crisp movies, under two hours. A two-hour movie is easy to see after dinner and doesn’t require a long commitment. It’s just more practical, too. You’re less likely to need a bathroom break in a 100-minute movie, as opposed to a 180-minute movie. Longer movies mean more money for babysitters, if you’re a parent. It may seem strange that audiences want less of a product, but it’s true.
As the saying goes: “We paid a lot of money, don’t give us too much.”
And it’s not just people watching movies that want shorter running times. People making movies also want the product to be shorter. Movie theaters can slot more showings, and sell more tickets, if running times are shorter. They also have more flexibility with scheduling if most movies are about the same length. A three-hour-plus movie doesn’t do anything for a theater’s profits, since people only buy one ticket and they only buy snacks once, regardless of the film’s length.
Studios don’t love long films either. Every additional day of shooting can cost tens of thousands of dollars or more. All the additional footage takes time to edit—that’s more money. And if a film has a lot of special effects—well that costs per minute, too.
So the stars are aligned for shorter movies, right?
As anyone who saw the three-hour epic “Oppenheimer,” knows, that’s not always true. Twenty years ago, the average length of a top box-office hit was a tick under two hours. Now, it’s two hours and twelve minutes—about eleven percent longer. Go back even further: hit movies today are fifty percent longer than they were in the 1930s.
And that’s just the average. Some of the biggest hits are marathons. Martin Scorcese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” clocks in at three hours, twenty-six minutes. “Babylon” from last Christmas was three hours, nine minutes. “Avengers,” the superhero film from before the pandemic—also three hours.
Crowd-pleasers like action movies and sequels used to be reliably short—100 to 120 minutes. But even they are longer these days , too. The fifth “Indiana Jones” movie, released last year, was the longest-ever. The seventh “Mission: Impossible” movie released this summer—also, the longest in that series at two hours, forty-three minutes. For “Mission: Impossible”!
Why is this happening?
The answer might be with the balance of power in Hollywood. In a typical movie, the director is part of the artistic team that makes the movie. The producer is part of the business team that funds the movie. And there’s a give-and-take with those two roles. The director usually wants a longer movie for artistic reasons. The producer wants a shorter movie to save on costs and to appeal to a larger audience at the box office. For a long time, producers had more leverage in this relationship, so the length of movies was held in check.
But two trends are shifting power to the directors and, as a consequence, making movies longer. First, there’s a lot of money and competition for directors’ talents. If a director doesn’t want to work for a producer known for being stingy, that director can just go to a different studio or a streaming platform. So increasingly, the directors have the upper hand .
Second, streaming is now a bigger part of the business equation. A lot of people used to casually go to the movies, pick anything, and watch it. These were your romantic comedies, your mid-budget dramas. Now, with streaming, most casual viewing is done at home. If you just want two hours of general entertainment, you don’t have to leave home for that.
So if a consumer is going to be motivated to leave the house and see something, the consumer wants that thing to be worth it. And so now a lot of feature films, intended for the big screen, will be longer to make the trip out to the movies seem worth it.
A lot of movies—even movies that are released in theaters—they’re being produced with streaming in mind, so running time is less of a concern. “Killers of the Flower Moon” will have a limited theatrical release. But after, it will be exclusively on Apple TV+. No need to worry about bathroom breaks at home: that’s what the pause button is for.
I definitely think twice before seeing a three-hour movie in the theaters. Weeks went by—I did want to see “Oppenheimer,” and I remember this exact thought going through my head—I thought, “okay, but not today, I don’t really want to see a three-hour movie today.”
There’s even an app—this just cracks me up—there’s an app called RunPee. And the app tells you when, during a movie, you should get up from your seat and go take a bathroom break. So if you’re in “Killers of the Flower Moon” and it’s already been an hour and forty minutes, you feel the urge—you’re not even halfway done! You’re going to have to get up at some point. So you can open the app RunPee and it will tell you when you should get up and use the bathroom so that you don’t miss the best scenes.
Quote of the Week
Time for a quote of the week. Here’s one from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He was an American poet. He says, “The best thing one can do when it is raining is to let it rain.”
This is about recognizing when you have control. We cannot control the weather—so when something happens we can’t control, we shouldn’t worry about it. If we can’t control it, let it happen and we can worry about our reaction to it.
“The best thing one can do when it is raining is to let it rain,” says Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
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