You know the feeling: You’re sitting in a movie theater. The film feels like it should be ending soon. Yet it just … keeps … going.
It’s not your imagination. Major wide-release films are getting longer — even if the average film produced is not.
Researcher Stephen Follows checked the run times of 36,000 films that were released theatrically from 1980 to 2025 and discovered the average length of a wide-release theatrical title has grown from roughly 106 minutes in the 1990s and early 2000s to 114 minutes in recent years. Films with big budgets — $100 million plus — tend to be even longer. He points out that pre-show advertising and trailers have also expanded to average around 20 to 30 minutes. So you’re spending more time sitting in a theater seat than ever before.
Another way to look at this: In the 1980s, 14 percent of wide releases ran more than two hours. In the 2020s, that number jumped to 32 percent.
The genre most responsible? Action films, which now average 128 minutes — a whopping 25 minutes longer than a few decades ago.
If you’re thinking this is caused by franchise movies like Marvel, Mission: Impossible and Fast & Furious films, you’re likely right, as Follows’ research points out that the more recent entries in many popular franchises have recently ballooned to record run times.
But it’s worth noting that plenty of non-franchise films have also rocketed past the two-hour mark lately. Current box office king Project Hail Mary runs 156 minutes, Dune: Part Two ran 166 minutes, and Oppenheimer ran 180 minutes.
That said, films made for less than $10 million have stayed pretty much the same length over the decades.
The reasons for the growth are likely numerous, from the rise of digital projection to studios increasingly wanting films to feel like major events — especially in this era of trying to sell premium format theater tickets like IMAX.
But the biggest reason is likely that — as much as some moviegoers love to gripe about long movies — box office returns suggest they appreciate a longer film when it’s a title they really want to see. The Lord of the Rings trilogy, arguably, really helped move the needle in terms of shifting the perception that epic-length event pictures wouldn’t deter audiences (the theatrical release of 2003’s Return of the King, for instance, ran nearly three-and-a-half hours).
Dune director Denis Villeneuve made the argument last year that young viewers, in particular, appreciate longer films.
“Oppenheimer is a 3-hour, rated-R film about nuclear physics that is mostly talking,” Villeneuve said. “But the public was young, that was the movie of the year by far for my kids. There is a trend. The youth love to watch long movies because if they pay, they want to see something substantial. They are craving meaningful content.”
Still, many of the greatest popcorn movies of all time managed to tell epic-feeling stories and still hit the two hour mark: Back to the Future is just under two hours. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back is only two hours and four minutes. Jurassic Park and Spider-Man 2 were both two hours and seven minutes.
