A movie's runtime indicates how long it takes to watch the movie. A good movie runtime is easy-to-find, displayed as prominently as the title, and doesn't require you to tap or click into some additional screen or webpage to learn how long the movie is. A great movie runtime is 100 minutes or less.
How did we get to the point where it's so hard to find out how long a movie is, and when you do, it's regularly 2+ hours long?
For several years, I've been riffing with friends about the mythical "tight 90" movie runtime. I'd assumed that our intuitive sense that movies are longer now was just that: an assumption not really backed up by data. But I dumped the Wikidata dataset, which powers the structured movie data you see on Wikipedia, and the trend could not be clearer...
What can we do about about bloated runtimes?
- The extreme corrective I've described to friends is that filmmakers should have to acquire a legal exemption from the government to release a movie with a runtime over 100 minutes
- As an alternative to making them illegal, we could try to make make longer runtimes embarrassing: creating a culture of runtime-hungry cinema-goers who think twice about seeing 120 minute movies
To that end, this website creates a permalink for all movies, presenting only the movie's title, release date, and its runtime, as an experiment in SEO farming. If people seeking runtime information discover this website and find themselves nodding along with the goal of more "tight 90" movies being made, we may be able to spread consciousness about this sensible constraint, and encourage more filmmakers to try to edit their movies to fall under 100 minute runtimes.