Get shorty! Why everyone needs to stop complaining about long films

The pitchforks are gathering at the gates of Hollywood. From the crowd, a chant: “No! More! Long! Movies!” It’s become one of the great cultural consensuses of our era: films are too long. Bring back short, sweet, 90-minute movies. Pete Davidson even did a rap about it. The argument is simple: we all have busy lives. In the digital frenzy of contemporary life, no one really wants to bunker down for any longer than they have to.

And yet, people like Martin Scorsese didn’t seem to get the memo. The legendary filmmaker returns this month with Killers of the Flower Moon, a three-and-a-half-hour epic set against a series of murders in the Osage Nation during the 1920s. It follows the director’s previous film, the similarly lengthy mob drama The Irishman – and even they are some way off his longest work, the four-hour documentary My Voyage to Italy. Scorsese isn’t alone in embracing the idea that “more is more”. Statistics show that the average runtime of mainstream cinema releases has risen drastically over the past several decades. While there’s no denying the slick satisfaction of a 90-minute sizzler, it’s pig-headed to look at art as something that has to be guzzled as quickly and efficiently as possible. Long movies are a thing to be luxuriated in – there is more scope for nuance, detail, room to breathe. A bottle of wine sipped over a long evening, rather than a round of tequila shots.

For all our collective fawning over short movies, the evidence suggests that audiences have more patience than we give them credit for. Earlier this year, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer was a smash hit, despite running for a positively gluttonous three hours. James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water was just as unrestrained, and became one of the biggest film releases of all time late last year. Look at the list of the highest-grossing movies ever, and you will see a lineup of hulking, cumbersome films: Titanic (195 mins); Avengers: Endgame (181 mins); Avatar (162 mins). Perhaps just as enticing as the prospect of seeing these films is the chance to have a nice collective whinge about them. “Did you see Oppenheimer?” “Oh God, wasn’t it so long?”

But, of course, there are reasons for the perseverance of long films that go beyond simple marketability. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, one of cinema’s foremost examples of “long” cinema, demands its cumulative nine-hour runtime – not because it needs to cover all the granular details of the source material, but because they are epics. We feel as though the Hobbits have experienced this huge and definitive undertaking because the films themselves are so vast: we might not have walked all the way to Mordor, but cinema-seat cramps are their own epic struggle.

The debate does not begin and end on the screen, either. The very same argument has been applied to literature, with people carping about the indulgence of 1,000-page doorstops. But often this length is required. Across every era and literary movement, there have been long, heavy masterpieces, works of genius utterly unconcerned with the requirements of an “easy read”. From Middlemarch to Infinite Jest, it really is this simple: if you limit yourself to the short and easily digestible, you’re missing out on some of the best writing around.

What about if it isn’t required? The old “too much of a good thing” adage seldom applies to the arts. Yes, Bruce Springsteen could come out for an hour and a half, blitz through his bangers and still leave everyone with their money’s worth. But even when you’re three hours deep into a set and yet to reach the encore, nobody’s there hoping that he’d just “wrap it up”. Artists such as Taylor Swift have increasingly thrown the idea of tightly curated 10-song albums into the dustbin, putting out long releases heaving with bonus tracks. And why shouldn’t they? If you don’t want to listen to the whole album, you don’t have to. But it’s nice to have the option.

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Likewise, some agreeable middle ground can be found in the instance of Ridley Scott’s forthcoming epic Napoleon, which casts Joaquin Phoenix in the role of the diminutive French tyrant. Scott raised a few eyebrows when he started talk of a four-and-a-half-hour cut of the film – an understandably tricky sell for general audiences. But Apple TV+ and Scott hammered out a compromise: a comparatively breezy 158-minute cut will be making its way to cinemas, while subscribers to the streaming service will be given the option of a four-hour director’s cut when it arrives on the platform soon after.

This is the long and short of it: nobody is forcing you to sit through overlong movies. If Killers of the Flower Moon is too arduous for you, simply don’t watch it. You’ve plenty of other options. The superlative 92-minute teen comedy Bottoms might be more your tempo. Before long, even this may seem too much for our internet-addled attention spans. In a few years, atavists like myself might be championing the patience-straining virtues of the 84-minute comedy epic Borat. If we’re not careful, an artform that has defined a century will eventually be compacted into the blink of an eye.

‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ is in UK cinemas from 18 October