Debates over movie runtime miss the point
By Andrew Benoit If you’ve seen a movie recently, you’ve probably been confronted with the common complaint that movies are just getting so long these days. Whatever happened to movies being 90 minutes? Plenty of recent long haulers do come to mind, like Scorsese’s “The Irishman” or Cameron’s “Avatar: The Way of Water,” both of which clock in at over three hours. Critics of these movies’ runtimes ask whether it’s reasonable for audiences to pay attention for such a long period of time. Yet these movies are the exception, not...