Are Movies Getting Longer?
Published on
With several longer movies being released in the last few years, there has been a rise in discussions about whether movies are getting longer.
Some recent movies have been 3+ hours, such as:
- Oppenheimer: 182 minutes
- Avatar: The Way of Water: 192 minutes
- The Batman: 177 minutes
- Avengers: Endgame: 181 minutes
Even more recent movies have been over 2.5 hours, including:
- Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One: 164 minutes
- John Wick: Chapter 4: 170 minutes
- Black Panther: Wakanda Forever: 162 minutes
- Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny: 155 minutes
To answer this question, I looked at the top 20 movies from the last 70 years to the present and at the median length of those movies each year to see if any trend showed up.
The data shows an increase in run time over each decade, except for the 1960s. Interestingly, the 1960s had many long movies, including Cleopatra (251 minutes), Lawrence of Arabia (228 minutes), and Doctor Zhivago (200 minutes). With these and many more, we see the 1960s had a higher median length than the 1950s and the 1970s.
Another interesting point is there is a big dip in 2020. The year the Covid pandemic started to shut down places caused some movies to be pushed back into the following year. But, most of the big movies that were delayed were longer causing 2020 to have mostly shorter movies.
We can zoom out a little to median values for each decade to smooth out the line a little to make it easier to see the trend.
So, yes, movies have gotten a little longer over the last few decades but not as much as I expected.
Methodology
I used the data mostly as-is for the top 20 movies for each year and compiled the median for each year. However, I did remove documentaries from the dataset. There were only a handful of documentaries that made it into the top movies and none recently. But, they almost all skewed the data for that year.
For example, in 1984 — the same year Ghostbusters, The Karate Kid, and Gremlins came out — a short 34-minute documentary about the Grand Canyon made it into the top movies. Several years before, a 4+ hour documentary also made it into the top movies.
Documentaries are watched differently than regular movies, so I did not include them in this analysis.
Unfortunately, the data for movies before the 1960s weren’t as reliable, and the number of films released in a given year was also much fewer than in later decades. This makes it challenging to compare earlier decades before 1960, but I did include a few of the later 1950s to better demonstrate that the 1960s were more of an interesting anomaly than a standard length of movies before the 1970s.
Sources
I came across The Movie Database which seemed to have everything needed and I could pull in data to work with using their API. I then used The Numbers and Wikipedia to verify any data that seemed inaccurate as well as to add in missing values.