How long is too long for Hollywood?
Holiday films are running overtime as creators search for the perfect ending
• Some advice if you’re planning a cinema visit: find a comfy seat.
Audiences have a history of flocking to watch epics, but Hollywood — perhaps striving to deliver credit-crunched viewers value for money — is delivering a glut of long films.
Three of the top titles at the North American box office — The Hobbit, Les Misérables and Django Unchained — have a combined running time of eight hours, 11 minutes. And not everybody is pleased with the trend.
The actor Samuel L. Jackson appears in Django, a bombastic spaghetti western from Quentin Tarantino, that weighs in at nearly three hours. He recently complained about another lengthy movie, Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. “I don’t understand why it didn’t just end when Lincoln is walking down the hall and the butler gives him his hat,” Jackson said. “Why did I need to see him dying on the bed? I have no idea what Spielberg was trying to do ... The movie had a better ending 10 minutes before.”
Paul Dergarabedian of the industry website Hollywood.com, said: “It does feel like Hollywood is struggling to find the exit,” he said. “Movies seem to achieve a perfect ending, and then they just keep going and going.”
Many of the gripes have been angled at The Hobbit, the first part of which will be a trilogy of films based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s slim children’s book. From its near-three-hour running time to its budget — an estimated $400 million, including marketing costs — everything about it is supersized. Critics have accused the director, Peter Jackson, of a lack of discipline, or worse — of trying to cynically cash in on the success of his Lord of The Rings triptych by spinning out a simple story. Django appears guilty of a similar sin, piling one climactic shootout on top of another.
Some filmmakers have blamed the corporate side of the movie business. “We now develop so many movie ideas based on pitches,” said Ben Affleck, who directed and starred in Argo. “The thing about a pitch is that it does a pretty good job figuring out the first and second acts, but no one ever sits down and works out the third act.”
However, duration appears to be no bar to critical or commercial success. The latest Bond film, Skyfall, which has just broken the $1 billion barrier, a first for the franchise, was 143 minutes long.
The highest-earning film of 2012, grossing $1.5 billion, was The Avengers (also 143 minutes), and one of the hottest contenders entering the awards season is Zero Dark Thirty, which devotes 160 minutes to the CIA’s hunt for Osama bin Laden.
Indeed, according to thewrap. com, an industry news site, the Top 10 grossing holiday movies of 2012 were nearly 25 minutes longer than they were two years ago.
The one group who might resent this are cinema owners. But even they are willing to lose out on the extra popcorn sales and other revenues that shorter stories can provide by allowing more screenings a day, experts say.
“The saying goes that a good movie is never long enough. If audiences are enthusiastic about a film, they have no problem staying in that world longer than they normally would for most movies,” said Phil Contrino, of Boxoffice.com.
“Sure, most exhibitors would prefer films to be shorter, but it’s not make or break. Some of the most successful films of all time — Titanic, Gone with the Wind, The Dark Knight Rises — ran more than two- and-a-half hours. The lesson is that length won’t stop patrons from showing up.”