We love a good Batman movie, but even we were taken aback by the nearly 3-hour runtime of upcoming release The Batman — which got us wondering: are movies getting longer?
The evidence, a review
The truth is that long movies, like Titanic at 3 hrs 14 mins or the final Lord of the Rings movie which is a whopping 3 hrs 21 mins, are nothing new. Indeed, a great study of 27,000+ movies on Towards Data Science from 2018 found limited evidence that movies on average had gotten longer in the last 20 years, confirming another independent study from 2014.
But what about just the really popular movies, the blockbusters that we all want to see?
The top 10
We got the data on the running times of the 10 most popular movies at the US box office for each year from 1995-2021 (source: The Numbers).
Last year the average length of a top 10 movie was 131 minutes, which was the highest in our dataset (but not by much). If you zoom out and look at a slightly longer time frame, like the last 5 years, the average length was 126 minutes. Again, that is the longest average for any 5-year period since 1995... but only by a few minutes.
So yeah, popular movies are getting longer — but only just.
