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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Gwilym Mumford

The Guide #137: A genre-by-genre rundown of the ideal film length

Guide United States
Couple watching a comedy film and enjoying their date at the cinema
Settle in for the show, however long it might take.
Photograph: RgStudio/Getty Images

Here we go again, with another round of long/short culture discourse. Just after we had got through double album April (thanks Beyoncé, Taylor and Cindy Lee), May brings us the latest skirmish in the movie length wars, with a poll of US cinemagoers establishing that the ideal movie running time is a sprightly 92 minutes.

That number is unsurprising. An hour and a half has long been fetishised as the perfect length for a film. Never mind that the average run time of films is actually increasing, or that only one of IMDb’s Top 20 greatest movies of all time – 12 Angry Men – is close to that number. (Every other film in that top 20 is two hours-plus, with several of them hitting the three-hour mark.)

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