Jack Wagner, Editor

If you take a look at this year’s best picture nominees, you may notice a startling pattern: five out of the 10 have run times of two and a half hours or longer, and only two, “Bugonia” and “Train Dreams” go for less than two hours. It isn’t just you– movies are getting longer, especially big budget big name productions. But why?

Long, epic movies are not new to Hollywood. In 1962, best picture winner “Lawrence of Arabia” had a run time of three hours and 42 minutes–so long the official theatrical cut included a 15 minute intermission. Several other nominees that year hovered around the three hour mark, and movies like “The Right Stuff” in 1983 and “The Green Mile” in 1999 sat at over three hours as well. But this sort of grand epic length is no longer constrained to Oscar nominees or artsy films;  Movies across the board are getting longer.

Researcher Stephen Follows looked at the data from over 30,000 movies from the 1980s to present day, and found that in the 1980s, only 14 percent of wide releases ran more than two hours. In the 2020s, that number spiked to 32 percent. The biggest culprit is big budget action films like the “Mission Impossible” series and the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), with the average run time of action movies going up by almost half an hour since the 1980s. Of the 15 films put out by the MCU since “Avengers: Endgame,” only four were under two hours, and three of those four were over one hour and 55 minutes. But it isn’t just action movies; Movies in general are slightly longer than in the past.

People point to a variety of causes for this, but one of the most common is the advent of streaming. At home movie viewers don’t have to worry about having to go to the bathroom during the film or running out of movie snacks–they can just pause it and resume when they feel ready. Movie theater ticket sales have been declining since 2002, with total sales dropping from 1.58 billion tickets to just 823 million in 2024.

“Casual moviegoing, where you wait until the weekend to pick what to see, has pretty much been supplanted by streaming,” said film producer Michael Shamberg.

This might be why theaters are trying to attract audiences with spectacle and why many theaters now offer reclining, padded seats and broader food options. Since movies are far more available at home, people going to theaters are looking for a grander experience.

Another thing some in the industry are blaming is the rise of auteur directors. People no longer see movies just for their favorite actors; big name directors like Christopher Nolan or Quentin Tarantino can fill seats on their own. With so much star power and streaming services entering the game as potential buyers for films, there is more pressure on studios to allow directors more control over their vision and the final product. This doesn’t mean these films will be bad, but it does mean fewer producers are stepping in to prevent excessive run times. Director Denis Villeneuve, for example, had an extreme amount of creative control over both “Dune: Part One” and “Dune, Part Two,” which have two hours and 35 minutes and 2 hours and 43 minutes runtime respectively. In fact, Villeneuve hasn’t made a film under two and a half hours since “Arrival” in 2016.

Whatever the true reasons for the lengthening may be, the fact remains that movies are getting longer. And with that comes a question: How many big spectacle blockbuster movies can people handle?