At the recent comi-con it has been rumoured that the new Batman v Superman film will come in at a ‘bottom numbing’ running time of 164 minutes, is that too long to spend in our favourite dark room?
My love of cinema started in the Eighties where it was rare for a film to go over 2 hours and in general most where around the 90-100 minute mark
This should surely be the ideal run time for a movie, I find myself in cinemas for nearer 3 hours these days when you add in the ever increasing amount of adverts and trailers prior to the film, now I must declare that my local cinema has a 3 hour time limit so this may have come into my reasoning but surely a tight 90 minute film would be better than a long drawn out film
Recently I re-watched Ted and the film was 106 minutes (but as I mention in my previous blog (https://barkingmadaboutfilms.wordpress.com/2015/07/16/ted-2-bear-illiant-or-not/ ) I personally felt they could have dropped the Donny storyline and the film would have been a lot tighter, take for example the incredibly funny Airplane, the film is jam packed with laughs and comes in at 84 minutes, surely it would have not been as good had it gone on nearer the 2 hour mark
One of the genre’s that I find particular guilty of dragging it out is the Romantic Comedy, the premise of this film is 2 leads will eventually fall in love, that is normally what we enter the film to see and should be done easily in 90 minutes but take You’ve got Mail, a sub plot about saving a book/coffee shop means it comes in at a run time of just under 2 hours
I absolutely accept that a biopic or drama can not be rushed and these in general should use their time to tell the story but action films or even comic book heroes do they need to be? Do we really want to be seeing a film at 8:30pm and getting out at near to midnight on a work night or an early showing at 11am means lunch after 2 (not including popcorn etc)
If run time was shorter, we could see more films in a day and surely this would be more attractive for cinemas? They could put more performances on to increase their revenue streams and smaller cinemas would benefit as they could probably show hourly in 2 screens rather than 4 giving attendees more choice of other films from freed up screens
What do you think, are you happy with the length of films or do you pine for the older days when they where shorter or am I just imaging that?
Let us know if we’re ‘Barking Mad’ or not, Bill and Pepper
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