According to Hollywood Elsewhere (via BOF), when it hits theaters on July 18, The Dark Knight will clock in at 152min - yes, that's 2 hours and 32 minutes of Batman goodness.Compare that to Batman Begins' 140min running time or Tim Burton's Batman's 126min.
I'm all for it in this case, but it definitely speaks to an overwhelming trend in the last decade or so. The practice of stretching out simple action-adventure pictures over the 2 hour mark seems to have really gained traction around the time the first Lord of the Rings movie was released in 2001 at 178minutes long (followed by the next two at 179min and 201min).
Read more and check out the research after the jump.
For my money, I prefer a tight 90min running time, but that's definitely not the style these days. 90min to 120min seemed to have been the standard for a while outside of biblical epics and art house fare. Lately you'd be hard pressed to catch a summer movie in under 2 hours.
To figure out if this is just my impression, I did a li'l research, and it seems that running times have indeed bulked up, especially as far as popcorn movies go. Maybe it's a justification of the high ticket prices, but I think it's probably more a symptom of the crazy budgets of these films. How do you chop out a sequence that cost $15 million of the special effects budget?
Anyhow, check out an abridged (and very unscientific) evolution of the running time:
2008 Top 5 Grossing Movies (So Far) [Average Running Time - 127min]
- Iron Man - 126min
- Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - 124min
- Horton Hears a Who - 88min
- The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian - 147min
- Sex and the City - 148min
- Saving Private Ryan - 170min
- Armageddon - 150min
- There's Something About Mary - 119min
- A Bug's Life - 96min
- The Waterboy - 90 min
- Rain Man - 133min
- Who Framed Roger Rabbit? - 104min
- Coming to America - 116min
- Big - 104min
- Twins - 105min
- Grease - 110min
- Superman - 143min
- Animal House - 109min
- Every Which Way But Loose - 110min
- Jaws 2 - 116min
No comments:
Post a Comment
Oh, be nice...