For some time now, the number of films that are around or over two and a half hours of footage are more and more numerous. You just need to take a look at some of this year's Oscar nominees: The Fabelmans, Elvis, Tár, All Quiet Front... And in movie theaters that haven't just picked up after the pandemic, it seems that it would be difficult for the public to dare to leave the house to have a good time in front of the big screen. Or not? because the three hours and twelve minutes of Avatar: The Sense of Water has not been an impediment to position itself as the highest grossing film of last year in Spain in just two weeks. Globally, the James Cameron-directed visual extravaganza about the continuation of Jake Sully and Neytiri's adventures on Pandora has grossed more than $2 billion (and counting).
Another sequel, that of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, has not done anything bad since its release in November. Its duration? Two hours and forty minutes. Ten fewer than the biopic in which Austin Butler transforms into the king of rock Elvis, another blockbuster that aspires to eight Oscars. However, productions like Pacifiction, by Albert Serra, with a length of 2 hours 45 minutes or the most recent Babylon, by Damien Chazelle, which exceeds 3 hours with a cast headed by stars like Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie, have not finished. to curdle among the respectable.
"Movies are very long now, possibly because of something that has always happened; that is, to mark what the character of an event is. The length, the density always seems more important, more spectacular. It happened with the great classic Hollywood productions, like Ben -Hur or Gone with the Wind, like the Biblical movies and the big adventure movies, history movies, which used to last a long time, sometimes up to three hours and more. Nowadays, movies like that are superhero movies , science fiction, big blockbusters like Marvel or Christopher Nolan productions and it seems that this weight makes them much more important. They give them that point of event and differentiates them from other types of options, so that you have to see them in cinema", says Ángel Sala, director of the Sitges fantastic film festival, in a chat with this newspaper.
For the veteran film critic Nuria Vidal, the fact that films last much longer has to do with the outbreak of the covid pandemic: "The confinement and closure of theaters boosted the consumption of cinema at home. Especially from series, series of four, six episodes that are seen in a row, in one afternoon. That is, cinema in sessions of three or four hours. The viewer has become accustomed to long stories. And how has cinema reacted in theaters? Lengthening their stories in a futile attempt to compete with the platforms. And he continues: "Useless because the cinema has a different rhythm; useless, because the cinema in the theater locks you in for two hours or more, while the cinema at home allows you to pause the viewing at will; useless because the stories suffer from the lengthen and repeat itself many times without need. There are movies that need long footage, but there are many others that don't. Knowing what the proper length of a movie is, is one of the jobs of good producers. But unfortunately, there aren't many they do".
In the opinion of producer Adolfo Blanco, head of the Verdi cinemas and the distributor A Contracorriente films, "films are longer due to the contagion of miniseries, which are designed for the long term for television and something of that is being building longer stories that go deeper into the characters. Then it is also true that the fear of duration has been lost. Before, a film of more than 90 minutes was long and now a film of less than two hours is short ".
However, the fact that they are longer has a big impact on the structure of the business. "As exhibitors, a long film takes up more space, costs more to project and is less profitable than a short one because there are fewer features. The public does not go to see a film because it is long, but because it is good. If it is long and the people goes and another is short and people go, I prefer that they go to the short one because more is entered". And he admits that the theaters are very clear that the length of the films "does not help us."
"In fact, they don't help the maintenance of others because when you get a long movie from a studio it's hard to say no to Avatar, but it throws out everything there is. Long movies are a very dangerous plague. I think not It's normal for a low-budget movie to cost the same as a $200 million production and maybe three and a half hours long. There should be a match between the budget and the quality of the movies, which is often associated with duration, and the price of admission. It would never occur to anyone that a 1,000-page book costs the same as a 90-page book of illustrious quotes in bold print. The cost of printing is very different. Our cost of impression is the time that you have people in the room attending to it, wasting light and not being able to put another film in. I think that each film should have its price and the duration can be a good reason to resume this debate", he points out.
Sources from Cinesa, the leading film exhibition company in Spain, say that "we do not perceive a public preference for films with durations of more than three hours" and they do not observe any difference between films according to their duration. "The billboard is made up of films of very different durations, adapting to the tastes and preferences of all users. With our commitment to the latest technology, we offer a complete experience for any title: an immersion into a new world in which you feel the protagonist and the hours fly by".
From the 1930s until practically the 1970s, the most conventional duration was around 90 to 100 minutes. With exceptions, of course. Especially if we refer to blockbusters already mentioned as Gone with the Wind (1939) with four hours; the 222 minutes of the epic Lawrence of Arabia (1962), by David Lean, the more than four hours of Cleopatra (1963) or the first two installments of the saga The Godfather, by Coppola.
In the eighties we find titles such as Once Upon a Time in America (1984), a masterpiece by Sergio Leone, a portrait of a gang of friends from New York that lasted 225 minutes, was presented on movie screens in two parts and failed miserably. O Shoah, an impressive nine and a half hour documentary on the Holocaust led by the Frenchman Claude Lanzmann. In the early 1990s, Oliver Stone's three-hour take on the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy in J.F.K.: Cold Case drew mostly critical acclaim.
Already at the end of the decade, another blockbuster by James Cameron, the love story of Titanic (1997), lasting 195 minutes, gathered the audience en masse despite its long length, won eleven statuettes from the Academy of Hollywood and went straight to number one of the highest grossing movies of all time. On the occasion of its re-release in theaters on February 10, Cameron has assured that "he would not change a single frame" and, regarding the length of the film, he has said emphatically: "Titanic showed that long films could make money, collect barbarities We broke the common consensus. If the movie is bad, it will be bad too if it lasts and a half. We actually did tests. And people wanted more."
Four years later, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, three hours of adventure by Peter Jackson and his adaptation of the famous novel by J.R.R. Tolkien which was followed by two other equally successful stories, both in millions of dollars and in critics and awards. Unparalleled successes that were born almost with the arrival of the new century and demonstrated to those producers allergic to risk that the public could spend more than three hours in a cinema and burst the box office. A situation that coincided with the arrival of the cinematographic technology revolution, which allowed digital cinema to gain ground over productions recorded on celluloid and lower costs.
Almost all the big blockbusters began to last more than two hours. And the public accompanied. From Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, through Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl or the two new trilogies of the Star Wars saga. Not to mention superhero movies. Viewers of Avengers: Endgame spent three hours in their seats and the final montage of Watchmen, by Zach Snyder, totaled 215 minutes.
Martin Scorsese is one of those directors who have taken a liking to long films. From the three hours of The Wolf of Wall Street to the two forty hours of Silence or the 209 minutes of The Irishman. In Spain, Jonás Trueba dared at the end of 2021 to summon the respectable for three hours and forty minutes with Who prevents it, an immersive experience with the portrait of adolescents who reflect on his generation. "I like to offer the viewer a long experience in which, suddenly, if you get hooked, you have a good afternoon and you feel that a lot of things have happened that you have lived through the film. I think there is a fear of duration somewhat symptomatic of the times, when, if we think about it, we do things that take up much more time", reflected the director in conversation with La Vanguardia.
Ángel Sala also refers to the influence that the vision of the series has on the viewer from confinement: "It may be that we are more used to seeing long lines of narration of many hours, which makes certain authors think that in the cinema that it can also work. Another debate would be how that is later consumed on platforms or in the domestic market."
But the director of the Sitges Festival also sees other reasons for the long duration of current film productions. On the one hand, "the need for certain independent or young authors to mark the freedom of their products and make very extensive commercial breaks in films that perhaps they would not need so much." He cites as an example, Everything at the same time everywhere, "which lasts two hours and twenty minutes and could have been resolved in less time, but the freedom of the Daniels with a production company like A24 gives them the option of making films taking advantage of what they have very complex plots and they have to be developed exhaustively".
Another of the points in question has to do with the fact that "there are platforms that give their authors a lot of freedom. There we see the durations of Bardo, González Iñárritu, a Netflix production or other recent releases on the platform. It seems that the more The longer a film is, the more important it is, despite the fact that on many occasions we have the feeling that there is excess footage.As an example, I would cite recent blockbusters such as Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, very stuffed, or Avatar itself: The Sense of Water, which It has a first hour that could have been edited."
"But well, there is, - he expresses by way of conclusion- long films, important themes, impact of the idea of event... the contradictions and complex commercial and authorial histories of the world of cinema today that, deep down, are not that transformations of things that have always happened with another face and another disguise".
