The Clock
Somewhere along the way, a superhero film stopped being two hours long. Spider-Man 2 ran just over two. Iron Man ran a little over two.
Then the numbers started creeping. Avengers: Endgame runs three hours. The Batman runs nearly three. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever runs well over two and a half, Eternals about the same, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 runs about 150 minutes and feels longer. Zack Snyder’s cut of Justice League runs four.
None of those stories needed that much time. Most of them needed a better editor, and a studio willing to listen to one. And I think the length has become a symptom of something bigger: franchise films that believe they’re important, and use running time to prove it.
I’ll sit through a long movie happily when it’s using my time. A blockbuster that spends its last act setting up a sequel I haven’t agreed to watch is a cheat. That kind of padding makes me feel like a customer being upsold instead of an audience being told a story.
Films That Earned It
Some films deserve every minute. Lawrence of Arabia runs nearly four hours, and the length serves the film: the desert has to feel endless, the crossing has to feel impossible, and Lawrence’s transformation has to happen slowly enough that you don’t notice it until it’s done.
The Godfather Part II runs well over three hours because it’s telling two stories across two generations, and every scene of young Vito’s rise sharpens the tragedy of Michael’s fall. Seven Samurai runs three and a half hours because Kurosawa needs you to know every one of those seven men, and every villager, before the bandits come. Heat runs nearly three because Michael Mann builds two full lives, a cop’s and a thief’s, and makes you care about both.
In every one of those films, the length does work. Take out an hour and you’d lose something essential, a character, a turn, a slow build that makes the ending hit. That’s the test, and it’s a hard one to pass.
For Writers
Lawrence of Arabia, The Godfather Part II and Seven Samurai use their length to do something a shorter film couldn’t. The running time is part of the story they’re telling.
What a long book lets you do should justify its length: build a world, develop several characters, let a transformation happen slowly enough to feel real. If your book is long, every chapter should be doing work that a shorter book couldn’t.
The test is brutal and simple. Imagine cutting a chapter. If the book loses something the reader would miss, the chapter stays. If the reader wouldn’t notice, it goes, however much you love it and however long it took to write.
Films That Just Took It
Now apply the test to the modern blockbuster.
Take an hour out of Eternals and what do you lose? Some exposition, a few flashbacks, a lot of standing around in fields. Take thirty minutes out of Wakanda Forever and the film gets tighter and stronger. Take the saggy middle out of Guardians 3 and the emotional climaxes hit harder, because they aren’t stacked on top of each other.
These films are long because they’re carrying extra weight: setup for the next film, callbacks to the last one, cameos, lore, a subplot for a streaming series and a character the studio wants to launch. The story isn’t three hours long. The franchise is.
For Writers
Modern blockbusters are long because they carry franchise obligations: setup, callbacks, cameos and lore. The story itself could usually be told in much less time.
Writers of series fall into the same trap. Book four has to remind readers of book three, set up book five and give every returning character a moment, and the actual story gets buried under maintenance work nobody asked for.
Protect the story of this particular book first, before anything else. Series obligations can be handled in a line or a scene. If they’re taking whole chapters, they’re taking over, and the reader who came for a story will feel it within a few pages.
Endgame, the Exception
Endgame is the one modern superhero film I’d argue deserved something close to its length. It was the end of a twenty-two-film story, it had dozens of characters to close out and it spent its first hour quietly, dealing with grief and failure before the time-travel plot kicks in. That slow first hour is the best part of the film.
But Endgame was a finale, the payoff to eleven years. The problem is that every film since has behaved as if it were a finale too. Phase Four and Phase Five films routinely ran well past two hours with nowhere near Endgame’s reason to.
I’ll give Endgame its due. That quiet first hour is the most human stretch Marvel ever put on screen, and I’d trade most of what came after it for another hour like that.
How Films Got This Long
There are a few reasons, and none of them are about the audience. Big budgets make studios reluctant to cut scenes that cost a fortune. Directors and stars have the clout to protect their favorite moments. Visual effects sequences get longer because they’re expensive, and nobody wants to throw away money. And a long film signals importance, the way a thick book looks more serious on a shelf.
Streaming has added its own pressure. When a film will end up on a service measured by hours watched, there’s little incentive to trim. A longer film is more content. That’s the logic of a platform, and it’s poison to a story.
What Length Costs
Every extra minute costs something. Tension leaks away. Emotional climaxes lose their force when there are too many of them. The audience gets tired, and a tired audience stops caring. A two-hour film with a clean arc will almost always hit harder than a three-hour film with the same arc buried under setup and spectacle.
Long films also demand a kind of trust. When you sit down for Lawrence, you trust David Lean to use your time well. When you sit down for the ninth film in a franchise, and it’s two hours and forty minutes, that trust isn’t there anymore. The audience has been burned too many times.
The Old Roadshow Epics
Long films aren’t new. In the fifties and sixties, Hollywood’s biggest productions, Ben-Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, were released as roadshow events, with reserved seats, printed programs, an overture before the film and an intermission in the middle. A long film was an occasion, and the studios treated it like one.
Those films were built for their length. They had a first half and a second half, a natural break, a structure designed for an audience that would get up, stretch and come back. Modern blockbusters run just as long, with no intermission and no structure to match. Nobody would call them epics. They’re ordinary films that forgot to stop.
The Cinema’s Side of It
Cinemas lose money on long films. A two-hour film can play five or six times a day on a single screen. A three-hour film might manage three or four. That means fewer tickets, fewer popcorn sales and less flexibility for the people running the building. Exhibitors have complained about bloated running times for years, and they’re right to.
Audiences pay a price too. A three-hour film, plus trailers, plus travel, eats an entire evening. For parents, it means a longer babysitter. For anybody who’s seen the last eight films in a franchise, it’s a big ask for a story that doesn’t need it.
The Four-Hour Cut
Zack Snyder’s Justice League is the extreme case. After the theatrical version flopped, fans campaigned for years to see Snyder’s original vision, and Warner Bros. eventually released a four-hour cut on streaming. For devoted fans, the length was the whole appeal: more of the characters, more of the world, more of Snyder.
It’s an odd piece of film history, and it proves that a certain kind of audience will happily sit through four hours of a franchise they love. It also proves my point. A film made for people who already love everything about it is a gift to the faithful, and it has nothing to say to anybody else. I don’t begrudge the fans their four hours. I just think a cut that long has stopped being a movie and turned into a scrapbook.
The Short Films That Worked
Some of the genre’s best films are short. The original X-Men runs just over an hour and forty minutes. Spider-Man 2 runs a little over two hours and doesn’t waste a minute. Iron Man runs about two. These films knew what story they were telling and told it. Even among long films, the best superhero movies are tight. The Dark Knight runs long, but it’s a crime epic with a sprawling plot, and it moves like a freight train. Length was never the enemy. Purposeless length is.
A Film Isn’t a Season
Part of the drift comes from television. Prestige series trained audiences to spend ten hours with a story, and franchise films started behaving as if they were episodes of one. Scenes that would have been cut in 1995 now stay in, because they set up something for a Disney+ series or pay off a thread from one.
But a film and a season are different shapes. A season can wander, because each episode has its own small arc and the audience can stop and come back. A film has one arc and one sitting. When a film tries to carry a season’s worth of material, it sags in the middle, and the audience can’t pause it in a cinema. I’ve written more about that in The Disney+ Series Drain.
The Fix
Forget rules about minutes. The fix is a question every editor should ask of every scene: what does this do for this story? For this film, this character, this ending. If a scene can’t answer that question, it goes. If the film comes in at an hour and fifty, good. Audiences have never complained that a great film was too short. They complain all the time that a mediocre one was too long.
Craft Note
Craft Note
The three-hour problem is really an editing problem. Studios stopped asking what each scene does for the story in front of them, and started asking what it does for the franchise.
Length is a promise to the reader that their time will be well spent. Every page that doesn’t keep the promise makes the next page harder to trust. Cut the scene you love most if the story doesn’t need it. Readers will never miss what they never saw. They’ll always remember what bored them.
Two Hours Is Plenty
A great story can run three hours, and a few films have earned it. Most modern superhero films haven’t, and studios keep mistaking bulk for weight. Their length comes from franchise obligations, expensive effects nobody wants to cut and a belief that long means important. Give me two tight hours over three bloated ones any night of the week, and I suspect most audiences feel the same even when studios don’t.
