The Long Film Is Back, and the Short One Should Be Worried

Somewhere between 2019 and 2023, without anyone quite announcing it, the three-hour prestige film stopped being an anomaly and started being a trend. The Irishman (209 minutes, 2019) was the leading indicator. Killers of the Flower Moon (206 minutes, 2023) confirmed the direction. Oppenheimer (180 minutes, 2023) made the long film commercially viable at a scale nobody in the studios had previously been willing to believe in. The Brutalist (215 minutes, 2024), released with an intermission and in VistaVision, treated the long film not as a concession to difficult subject matter but as the form its subject matter required.

There are more. Babylon (189 minutes). Avatar: The Way of Water (192 minutes). Dune: Part Two (166 minutes, short by this essay’s standards but long by any other). The Beast (Bertrand Bonello, 146 minutes, but feels longer and is better for it). The pattern is not, I think, coincidence. Something has shifted in the economics and the aesthetics of prestige filmmaking, and the length is the most visible sign of the shift.

What the studios used to believe

For roughly fifteen years (2005 to 2020), the received studio wisdom on running time was strict and, on its own terms, rational. Films longer than 135 minutes played fewer daily showtimes. Fewer daily showtimes meant less per-screen revenue. Less per-screen revenue meant reduced screen count in the second week. Every thirty minutes of running time cost the studio real box office. The accounting was remorseless, and the result was that even serious auteurist films were cut down to approach the 120-minute mark wherever possible.

The streaming era broke this accounting in a specific way. Theatrical screen-economics still applies to the films that open theatrically, but the second-largest revenue source for prestige films (streaming home viewing) has no running-time penalty. A 180-minute film on a streaming service is not serviced differently from a 120-minute one. The home viewer can pause, spread the film across two nights, pick it up again a week later. Length, in the streaming window, is no longer a commercial liability.

What the filmmakers are doing with the space

Length, on its own, is not a virtue. A badly-paced 180-minute film is a tedious 180-minute film, not a profound one. What the current wave of long films share, and what makes the trend worth defending, is a specific use of running time to do dramatic work that the 120-minute form cannot accommodate.

The clearest case is The Brutalist. The film’s central argument, that a European-Jewish architect’s assimilation into mid-century American life is a study in slow moral corrosion, is an argument that has to be felt over time. The compromises accumulate. The patron’s affection curdles into ownership. The marriage goes brittle. At 120 minutes, these would be announced through a montage. At 215 minutes, they are lived through, and the difference is the film.

Killers of the Flower Moon works similarly. The specific horror of the Osage murders in 1920s Oklahoma is not, primarily, the violence. It is the duration: the years across which the killing proceeded, the patience with which white claimants married into Osage families and then poisoned them, the slow-building pattern that the film’s 206 minutes are specifically scaled to transmit. A two-hour version of that film would deliver a tragedy. The three-and-a-half-hour version delivers a crime.

Oppenheimer is the outlier, and its commercial success explains some of the trend. Christopher Nolan made a film structured around three interleaved timelines and two visual palettes (colour and black-and-white), and he used the length not for duration-as-argument but for duration-as-rhythm. The film moves fast across three hours. The length allows the cross-cutting pattern to develop, but the individual scenes are not, by Nolan’s standards, long. The film demonstrated that length, in the hands of a director with a specific rhythm, is not dramatically penalising for audiences.

Why the audiences turned up

Here is the industrial fact that the last three years have made legible. Audiences will turn up for a 180-minute film if the film is clearly an event. Oppenheimer grossed almost a billion dollars at an R rating and a three-hour run time. Killers of the Flower Moon underperformed theatrically (in part due to Apple’s distribution strategy) but became a major Oscar contender anyway. The Brutalist, on an $9.6 million budget, cleared $50 million worldwide, which is more than five times the money.

These are not the numbers of a dying format. These are the numbers of a format that audiences are specifically willing to make time for when the marketing correctly signals the event.

The counter-example is Megalopolis, which was 138 minutes (shorter than most of the films under discussion) and which did not find its audience. Length, on its own, is not the selling point. Event-ness is the selling point. Length is what the event can accommodate.

What this means for the 100-minute film

I want to be fair. The 100-minute film is not going away. There will always be comedies, thrillers, and mid-budget dramas that benefit from compression. The 100-minute film is not a moral failure.

What the long-film trend demonstrates is that the 100-minute film is not, any longer, the default prestige format. A serious film now has the option, and increasingly the expectation, of running beyond two hours if the material supports it. Ten years ago, this was an exception that had to be argued for, usually unsuccessfully. Today it is a starting position.

This is, on balance, good news for serious cinema. The 100-minute film had, across the 2010s, become a specific kind of prestige compression, where novels were abridged down to their plot beats and adult dramas were cut to fit inside the window of a second daily showing. The films that resulted were often competent. They were rarely ambitious in the way the material deserved.

What to watch for

The next test of the long-film trend will arrive at various points across 2026 and 2027. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another (announced at 161 minutes). Martin Scorsese’s next, reportedly in post-production at a length beyond 180 minutes. Bong Joon-ho’s follow-up to Mickey 17. Lynne Ramsay, rumoured.

Each of these will have to make the case for its own length. None will make the case by length alone. The question is whether the films use the time to do something the short form cannot, and whether audiences will continue to show up when the event is clear.

I am, guardedly, optimistic. The long film has been asking to come back for a decade. Now it is back. The short film will have to work harder.