Why Are Movies Getting Longer?

For a while now, people have been asking why movies are getting longer over time. It’s been a popular topic of discussion over the last couple years, which has led to the likes of CNN and Variety magazine trying to provide answers for this question. In reality, this trend isn’t as linear as it seems.?

You see, there isn’t a linear rise in the duration of movies as time has passed. We started with short, silent movies in the late 19th and early 20th century, due to the limitations of the equipment that we had to work with at the time. But by the time Hollywood's golden era came around, movies had gone from being sub-ten minutes in run time to hours long. Gone With the Wind, which was released in 1939, clocked in at a run time of 222 minutes. 1900, which was released in 1976, had a run time of 317 minutes. The list goes on.

With that being said, there was a reason why movies would average a run-time of 90-ish minutes. The first was the rise of Television. Television allowed movies to be re-run after cinematic release. With that being said, broadcast TV only had limited channels and slots, so movies really couldn’t exceed 90-100 minutes in run-time, to comply with the allocated slot they had been given. This then evolved into VHS, which faced a similar issue for different reasons. There was only a limited amount of space available on these tapes, which meant that again, movies couldn’t exceed a certain run time if they wanted to distribute the final product on VHS. DvD’s once again ran into the same problem. Whilst they have more memory, it was still limited. For example, James Cameron’s Avatar, which came out in 2009, had to be split onto 2 separate discs, due to there not being enough memory to put the 3 hour film onto a single disc.

But things have changed over the past ten years with the rise of Video on Demand & streaming services. There is no memory limit for movies to be distributed online, so there’s no reason for big blockbuster Hollywood films to shorten their runtime. Furthermore, television isn’t quite the monolithic giant that it used to be. With Disney+, Netflix and Amazon Prime having over 200 Million subscribers, as well as an unlimited number of slots for films and TV shows, it’s a no-brainer for most big budget studios to distribute their content through these channels after premiering them at the cinema. This, by proxy, means that they are able to extend the length of their films to really tell the story that they want to tell without feeling as though they have to limit themselves anymore.

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