Picture this: It’s April 2019. You’re about to see the long-awaited ‘Avengers: Endgame’ in the nearest movie theater, and you’re more hyped than you ever have been, but you don’t realize until you’re fully settled in that it’s just a little over three hours. Is this what you’ve been waiting on for the past year? Why is a three-hour runtime so intimidating? Will you just be overwhelmed the whole time?
Despite concerns about attention spans decreasing, the success of certain movies with longer durations like ‘Oppenheimer’ and ‘Avatar’ suggest that audiences are more than willing to invest time in films with high production values. The rise of streaming platforms has also changed content consumption, with episode formats getting more popular. Filmmakers like Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino have started to intentionally create longer movies, pushing for an immersive experience that needs more time for thorough exploration of the story. Martin Scorsese, whose last film was just shy of three hours and a half, sat down with Deadline to talk about the flick. “The risk is there, showing it in a theater in the first place. I know I could sit down and watch a film for three or four hours in a theater. I say to the audience out there, ‘Make a commitment. Your life might be enriched,’” Scorsese said in the article.
People are still against long movies. It’s hard to pay attention 100% of the time in the theater or even at home, you’ll most likely pull out your phone at one point during the movie. It’s also tough to keep up with your favorite stars. If Zendaya is constantly doing 150-minute movies every year, it’ll be tougher to watch all of them, because you don’t have enough headspace to do so, especially with the overstuffing of content into those 150-minute periods.
Writers and directors have also pitched in, saying that they are putting in too much work for fans to not even appreciate it. At the Middleburg Film Festival, ‘Election’ director Alexander Payne sat down for a Q&A about his recent movie. “Film is a constant search for economy. You want the screenplay as short as possible. You want the acting as brisk as possible, given whatever the basic rhythm of that film is. And then in the editing you want it to be as short as it can be, but no shorter,” Payne said in the interview.
Marvel is not the only big-name studio making their movies longer, the well-known movie series ‘The Hunger Games’ released its fifth movie on Nov. 17, and it’s almost 160 minutes, making it the longest in the franchise. In its opening weekend, the movie grossed over the production budget worldwide, the amount to make the film. Large IPs and brands should be able to make however long movies they want because people will for sure go to see them. It means that they will get more money nonetheless, and still be able to develop a narrative.
People are also losing their attention spans to media that isn’t interesting to them. Viewers can go to a 3+ hour concert or a concert film, yet won’t get bored because they know about the topic and are interested in the singer, but when 3+ hour biopics are made, trying to inform people on important events in history with stacked casts and good writers behind it, audiences say they are bored and don’t care. “I don’t think movies have gotten longer but I do think that movies have lost their interesting plots which makes them a lot harder to watch,” sophomore Tamara Tomyan said.
So yes, maybe our attention spans are getting shorter, but it’s only because of our own doing. If you don’t want to pay attention, and you’d rather watch a 15-second TikTok, you might want to get into the right headspace before watching a 180-minute flick, because you might end up learning something and enjoying it all at the same time.
