‘Bigger than Ben-Hur’:why movies are getting longer ... and longer

If you settled down to watch the films up for best picture at the Academy Awards this year,you needed a comfortable seat. And possibly a snack.

WhileDrive My Car is a masterful Japanese drama,it runs for a tick under three hours.

Also well over two hours – and sometimes feeling it – are the musicalWest Side Story,sci-fi picDune,thrillerNightmare Alley,tennis biopicKing Richard,comet extinction satireDon’t Look Upand comic-dramaLicorice Pizza.

The shortest nominees this year are Jane Campion’sThe Power of the Dog(128 minutes),comic-dramaCODA (112 minutes) and,a cinematic sprint rather than a marathon,Irish dramaBelfast (97 minutes).

While there have always been sweeping Hollywood epics –Cleopatra topped four hours when it premiered in 1963 – the standard length for a movie in cinemas was once 90 to 120 minutes.

But many movies have become tests of endurance,especially as Hollywood superhero blockbusters pack in storylines for an ensemble of characters.

The hugely successfulAvengers:Endgame (181 minutes) was long enough. ButZack Snyder’s Justice League (242 minutes),the director’s cut that started streaming last year,was literally bigger thanBen-Hur (212 minutes).

The chief executive of Palace Cinemas,Benjamin Zeccola,said films started getting longer when the industry moved from 35mm to digital projection almost a decade ago.

Because studios often had to make hundreds of prints of major films,they had a financial incentive to keep them to a standard length,with a print of a three-hour release costing twice as much as one for a 90-minute film.

“Through their producers,they made sure directors would cut their films to a responsible length that optimised the entertainment value and eliminated any unnecessary cost of prints,” Zeccola said.

With digital projection,films could run longer without extra costs to the studio,which meant “directors can create the masterpiece they want to create without it needing to be cut to fit a budget”.

Zeccola said longer films had become a problem for cinemas. Instead of six sessions a day,they struggled to fit five and patrons were discouraged when nearby parking was only for two hours.

With streaming services wanting to attract big-name directors – and subscribers accustomed to watching series – there has been no incentive for Netflix to tell Martin Scorsese to trimThe Irishman or Adam McKay to take 20 minutes out ofDon’t Look Up.

Bruce Isaacs,associate professor of film studies at the University of Sydney,said studios had let movies become “dramatically bloated” so they could become cinema events.

“Are they too long? God,I’d say absolutely,” he said. “Every Marvel movie is too long by about half an hour.

“I think there’s a desire,just in the last few years,to throw in as much as you can because you’re competing with a whole new medium in digital streaming.”

As well as wanting to offer cinema-goers value for money,Isaacs said studios believed that a long movie was more prestigious.

“From about the ’50s,the highest prestige movies tended to come out at extreme lengths,” he said. “If the norm of the classical studio era was about 80 to 90 minutes,occasionally you’d have aGone with the Wind.

“It would have to say ‘this is different,this is a truly prestige picture,adapted from a very long novel and made into a very long film with an elaborate budget’. I think we’re still seeing that.”

In the 1960s and ’70s,independent directors began changing filmmaking and European cinema became more influential,which resulted in movies that told a story more economically.

Short films could win best picture at the Oscars,includingAnnie Hall (93 minutes),Driving Miss Daisy (99 minutes) andThe French Connection (104 minutes).

Australian cinematographer Peter Levy,who has been working in Los Angeles for three decades,believes Hollywood movies have become “a corporate instrument,a revenue device” and the best format for telling stories has become multiple episodes on a streaming service.

“Having just finished a limited series – six one-hours – I think it gives the writers a bigger canvas to work on,” he said. “They can weave much more complex stories. The feature format of telling a story in three acts in 90 or 100 minutes is running out of gas.”

The 94th Academy Awards are on Monday,screening on Seven and 7plus live from 11am and replayed at 9.40pm. Follow our live blog of the red carpet and ceremony from 9am.

Find out the next TV,streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees.Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.

Email the writer at gmaddox@smh.com.au and follow him on Twitter at@gmaddox.

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