Walking out of a 6.30pm showing of The Naked Gun a couple of weeks ago I was greeted by an unfamiliar sight: daylight. Had I gone to see the film in the upper reaches of the northern hemisphere, where daylight is near-permanent in the summer months? No I was in Leicester Square – a different kind of barren wasteland than the Arctic tundra – and there was another reason for the brightness: The Naked Gun was only 1hr 25m long.
Very few modern films – aside from those of the child-friendly variety – clock in at less than 90 minutes, but even so The Naked Gun doesn’t feel a total outlier. In fact, of the last three blockbusters I’ve seen at the cinema, only one – Superman – went beyond the two hour mark, and only by 10 minutes. The other, The Fantastic Four: First Steps, was 1hr 54m, relatively svelte for a 21st-century superhero movie. Granted, earlier in this summer we had Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, clocking in at a Brobdingnagian 2hr 49m (and boy, at times did it feel it), but looking back now, that almost feels a relic from and earlier, more indulgent time.
Because, generally the blockbuster seems to be getting shorter. The average for this year’s top 10 movies so far at the US box office (which seems to me the best benchmark for the health of the blockbuster given they make and consume the bulk of them), is 2hr 4m. That number (sure to be nudged up further by Avatar: Fire and Ash later this year) is actually higher than last year’s average between the top 10 – 2h 01m – but way down on the 2hr 15m and 2hr 16m of 2023 and 2022 respectively. Those years admittedly featured some hefty movies like Oppenheimer (3hrs) bumping up their averages, but also some silly lengths for movies of a more disposable nature: how, for example did John Wick 4, a dialogue-light film about a man hurting other men in various imaginative ways, clock in at a whopping 2hr and 49m? Or why did The Batman brush right up to the three-hour mark? And did the live-action Little Mermaid really need to be two and a quarter hours? The animated original managed to rattle through the story in almost an hour less.
Listen, we probably talk too much about films being too long these days: it’s something I have definitely been guilty of in this newsletter, somewhat absurdly because I don’t actually have a problem with long films at all – especially when a bladder-aiding intermission is included as part of the deal. I’m generally of the belief that films should be as long as they need to be and, in some cases, a film needs to be very long indeed. But it’s certainly the case that blockbusters, once designed to provide quick, easy thrills, have tended toward bloat since the 2010s. Much of that of course has to do with the steroidal growth of the superhero movie, which, in service of the “expanded universe model” of interlocking films, had to incorporate more and more convoluted backstories and peripheral characters into its run times. That feature soon became a bug, with endless complaints in thinkpieces and on forums that superhero films had grown too long.
But there has been a sense in recent years that the superhero industrial complex has listened to the ambient noise around its films being too long. You could see those stirrings in the desire by Nia DaCosta, director of 2023’s The Marvels, to make that film under two hours. She succeeded and then some: it’s the shortest Marvel movie of all, at 1hr 45m. (Though given The Marvels is regarded as one of the weakest Marvel movies, such brevity doesn’t always equal quality.)
Equally Superman director James Gunn had to deny rumours Warner Bros had ordered him to make the film shorter: he perhaps should have listened given the movie’s weakest moment is an impossible to follow city-smashing final battle that goes on for at least five minutes more than it needs to. Certainly there’s a sense watching The Fantastic Four that it strives to stay under the two-hour mark. In doing so it perhaps over-corrects a little: a blossoming romance between Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s The Thing and Natasha Lyonne’s schoolteacher suddenly vanishes midway through the movie – or more likely was sent to the cutting room floor by clockwatchers. Still, that did probably contribute to a film that, while not without flaws, felt appealingly brisk.
Hopefully more mainstream movies can follow its example, as well as that of The Naked Gun, whose 1hr 25m runtime is identical to that of the original movie in the franchise in 1988. Back then that was a little less of an outlier: the average run time of the top 10 highest grossers that year – a time Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Coming To America, Die Hard and the like reigned supreme – was a positively breezy 1hr 48m … so there’s still a long way to go in films getting shorter.
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