A Shorter Movie is a Better Movie

My ideal film is one that has 15 minutes removed from it.

Recently, my friends and I saw “Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell” in theaters. It’s a film about a man who travels to a rural village in Vietnam to bury his sister-in-law. The movie is meditative, pondering questions of faith, death, and familial loss. It’s also one of the most visually lush movies I’ve seen in a long time. I would gladly take any still from the movie and frame it in my home.

There are many virtues you can sing about that movie. Brevity isn’t one of them though. I took kindly to the film in its first 45 minutes. I was less warm once we’d passed the 90-minute mark. Hour 2 was when I took a nap and woke up to find we still had a good chunk of this 3-hour long movie to go. As we were leaving the theater, my friend said, “There’s probably a good 2-hour version of that movie in there somewhere.”

Still from “Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell.” Source: CJ CGV.

These days more often than saying a movie is bad, I will say it was long. I find myself frequently espousing the opinion that a film could be 15 minutes shorter, even when it’s something I’ve enjoyed. You’ll never hear me say, “That movie could have used a couple of minutes of extra time.” Much like playwright Patrick Marber, who once said his favorite key is delete, my impulse is always to trim something down. I like works to be tighter, shorter. I delight in throwing things away.

The length of a movie has become something I’m obsessed about. These days, before I arrive at the theater or even before I buy a ticket, I Google the movie’s runtime to make sure I know what I’m in for. I acquired this habit the hard way after I went into a screening of “A Brighter Summer Day” with no knowledge of its near 4-hour length. A friend who was with me had a panic attack during the movie’s third-hour stretch and walked out of the theater because it’s hard to appreciate art when you don’t know if it has a limit.

I didn’t used to care about movie length this much. But then I turned thirty and my body revoked those privileges of youth. Now if I sit for too long in a theater without moving, my shoulders stiffen. Tension starts to build in my neck. Past a certain runtime, I become the person I once hated: I need to check my phone to see how much time I have left. A long runtime has become a hurdle to overcome, something you like the movie in spite of, not because of.

So how long is too long?

If I had my say, my ideal movie length would be between 90 minutes and 2 hours. Past the 2-hour mark, a story is in danger of overstaying its welcome. Two and a half hours is a time commitment. Three hours and up is an endurance sport. No movie should be Scorsese length—not even a Scorsese film.

I’m not the only one feeling the brunt of a long film. My coworkers with young children talk about the impossibility of seeing a film that’s over two hours long. My friends discuss finding the right time in a movie to pee. In the past few years, several publications have published articles debating whether film, in general, has gotten longer, perhaps because the presence of gargantuan undertakings like “Killers of the Flower Moon” (3 and a half hours), “Oppenheimer” (3 hours), and “Babylon” (3 hours) were fresh on everyone’s mind

Still of “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Source: Apple.

It’s a good question, whether movies have ballooned in runtime, but the answer isn’t as clear-cut as you’d think. In data scientist Przemysław Jarząbek’s article “Are new movies longer than they were 10, 20, 50 years ago?”, he says no, not really. After examining the runtime of popular titles on IMDb, which includes 27,951 movies from 1911 to 2018, Jarząbek concludes there is no visible trend of movies growing longer in the last few decades. The biggest jump in runtime occurred between the 1930s and 1940s. Any difference in runtime after the 1950s has been marginal.

The findings of UI designer Matt Birchler, however, tell a different story. Birchler’s 2023 article “Are movies actually getting longer?” looks at the top 50 movies on Letterboxd of every decade from the 1970s to the 2020s. Based on this data, Matt Birchler argues that there’s been a steady increase in runtime since the 1980s, with the 2020s boasting an average runtime of 2 hours 10 minutes, 15 percent longer than the 80s movies’ average runtime (1 hour and 53 minutes). His findings contradict Jarząbek’s, but as a caveat, the movies he’s studying are of a smaller pool. Unlike Jarząbek, though, he’s considering movies past 2018, making his information more up-to-date.

But runtime or not, does a movie feel long?

It’s worth noting that a movie doesn’t have to be objectively long to wear on you. Length is an elastic concept. Some films are long and feel long, like “Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell.” There are also movies that are short but feel long. Last year, two of the shortest movies I saw, “Chan is Missing” (80 minutes) and “Heroes Shed No Tears” (82 minutes) were also the ones where I was the most restless. In the theater, I remember feeling trapped by the former’s slow pace and exhausted by the latter’s frenetic storytelling.

Very few are the movies that are long but feel short, the ones that make me realize: oh, it’s possible for me to not be bored? It’s a rare achievement for a film to feel half an hour shorter than its actual runtime — “Conclave,” for instance, gives the impression of a brisk 90-minute movie, not a movie that’s 2 hours long — or for me to not register a movie’s considerable length because I was engrossed from beginning to end, as was the case for “Wicked” and “Dune: Part Two.”

Engrossment is everything. If I’m engaged, I’m happy. If I’m unengaged, I’m counting the minutes until I’m allowed to leave. As a friend put it best: “Some movies could be 2 hours long and I would sit and watch 8 more hours of this. And some movies are an hour and 20 minutes, and I feel like it’s 20 minutes too long.”

Last year, of the 70 movies I’ve seen, I found almost half of them to feel longer than they were. Some had little happening, like “Janet Planet.” Some were overstuffed with too many ideas, like “Deadpool & Wolverine.” Some felt less exciting because they were retreading the story beats of their predecessor, like “Inside Out 2.” Many movies were beautiful. Many had an ending that felt like it was never going to come. You think to yourself, okay, here’s a good place for this movie to reach its endpoint. Then: okay, we missed that turn back there, but we can take this exit here. It’ll still be good. And then before you know it, 20 minutes have gone by and your back hurts and you can’t remember what the feeling is like to be able to stretch. Or exist outside of this dark, boxed room. And the movie is still not done.

So, let’s not do this. If you’re a good movie, you’re only improving yourself by taking a look in the mirror before you leave the house and taking one thing off. If you’re a bad movie, at least shaving off 15 minutes will make you a briefer one.