Hollywood flirting with lengthy movies again

I think you have watched Avatar: The Way of Water by now. But if you haven’t, I understand.

The film is over three hours long and finding three hours in the week to spend at the cinema is easier said than done. You may have to wait till the movie comes to streaming to watch it because three-hour films are easier to consume at home. You can watch them at your leisure, pausing every 40 minutes or so to use the bathroom, get more food, etc.

Granted, you can do the same in a cinema. Avatar: The Way of Water comes with an intermission, which was new to me. Its runtime caught many off-guard. Hollywood is not a fan of long films, and for a good reason. First, the public does not have the patience. Look at novels.

Traditional publishers encourage aspiring authors to keep their debut novels short because avid readers won’t take chances on long books from first-time authors. Some people won’t read anything longer than 400 pages, regardless of the author’s experience and reputation.

Games are in a similar boat. I know people that rejected Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey when they saw a picture of a map in the game littered with points of interest and realized that it would take them hundreds of hours to finish it.

With movies, things are changing. Initially, Hollywood could not trust moviegoers to tolerate longer films. Family movies make money because they are short and simple enough to keep young children engaged. This is why studios work so hard to avoid adult ratings. A PG or PG13 rating attracts children, which, in turn, gives their films a boost in the box office.

But Hollywood will get behind any trend that makes them money, which is why longer runtimes are slowly gaining traction. Avengers: Endgame was three hours long, yet it made nearly $3 billion at the box office.

But that does not mean studios will attach a three-hour runtime to every movie they make in 2023. Again, money is the deciding factor here. Longer movies make less money in most cases because you have fewer showings per day. Avatar and Endgame are exceptions.

Their popularity allowed them to overcome this handicap. Avatar may hit the $2 billion mark in a few weeks because people keep returning to the cinema to rewatch it. Endgame was the same. Most three-hour movies don’t enjoy that kind of popularity.

The Irishman would have lost money if Hollywood had released the Martin Scorcese film on the big screen. No one goes to the cinema to watch three- hour mobster movies. It is worth noting that long movies are nothing new in Hollywood.

Gone with the Wind has a runtime of nearly four hours, and film critics categorize it as a classic. Lawrence of Arabia, Ben Hur, and Cleopatra are in the same boat. Unfortunately, these projects tend to attract hardcore film fans, and their numbers are too few to prop up movies of this ilk in the cinema.

The longest film I have ever seen was the director’s cut of The Return of the King (4 hours 10 minutes), and I loved every minute of it. I don’t mind sitting through a long movie I love. Hollywood can train mainstream audiences to embrace longer movies if they start assigning 3hr+ runtimes to franchises like Marvel and Star Wars.

Interestingly, the longest movie I could find online is Amra Ekta Cinema Banabo. The Bangladeshi Bengali feature film is 21 hours long, which is simply stupid.

katmic200@gmail.com