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

It’s become voguish to sing the praises of 90-minute movies and bite-sized books and plays, writes Louis Chilton. With a run-time of almost four hours, Martin Scorsese’s ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ isn’t ‘too long’ – it’s part of an art form, from George Eliot to Bruce Springsteen, that demands patience and persistence

Don’t get the long idea: Leonardo DiCaprio in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ (Apple)

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?”