Three hours? There’s no way I’m watching that movie

Illustration by David Foldvari

Kirsten Dunst has seen every Oscars contender this year because she’s a member of the Academy. I have not, because they’re too long. Of the 10 movies nominated for best picture, I have watched exactly half. I think this is pretty respectable, especially considering the complicating factor that not a single one of those films hits the sweet spot of my cinematic attention span (and, I would argue, the ideal cinematic attention span for us all): the hallowed 90-minute mark.

In fact, if we’re going to get technical about it, only two of this year’s nominated movies, Bugonia and Train Dreams, are less than two hours long – and only just. Admittedly, this year’s selection is an improvement on the cinematic-epic trend of the past few years. In 2025, Dune: Part Two was almost three hours long, as was Wicked: For Good, which somehow spun a musical made for children and Disney adults into a two-parter with a cumulative runtime of five hours.

The Brutalist was so self-indulgently lengthy that showings of the 215-minute movie required an intermission. Even non-Oscar-bait movies are guilty: The Batman, released in 2022, was two hours and 56 minutes long. Does a superhero movie ever need to be two hours and 56 minutes long?

There are other things I dislike about modern cinema. Gaffers light every scene like they either want to make us squint or blind us; the women in period dramas are always wearing an anachronistic smoky nighttime eye; and every Emerald Fennell movie, as Tina Fey has pointed out, takes the same sexually violent turn in the third act that we, the audience, must pretend to be surprised by. But yes, length is up there.

For a while, a certain ideology dominated cinema: the theory that longer was better, more artistic, more serious. I’m not sure it’s quite true, though. Sometimes stretching a movie out just forces film-makers and poor, streaming-fatigued scriptwriters to return to the same plot points over and over again, hammering them home and, in the process, making the writing more obvious and less likely to be screenshotted with the subtitles on for a film undergrad’s aesthetic Instagram story. Matt Damon recently complained about how Netflix encouraged scriptwriters to “reiterate the plot three or four times in the dialogue”. “It’s really going to start to infringe on how we tell stories,” he said.

Why does Netflix want this? Is it because they think audiences are idiots who, to understand a movie, need it to be as long as Ben-Hur but with the helpful dialogue of an episode of Ms Rachel? As much as I’d like to believe that Netflix is this evil, their reasoning is depressingly salient. They know everyone is watching movies on their phones.

I would like to say I am above this, but the truth is I’m not. Like everyone else, my attention span has been ruined by social media, by watching Life Is Beautiful in 48 parts on a TikTok split screen with my eyes occasionally flickering to the Subway Surfers clip below it. Like any addict, I ache and itch for my phone when I have to be apart from it for more than 90 minutes.

I have seen the damage of this firsthand. Recent releases I watched in a cinema, including Marty Supreme and Die My Love, were things I could metabolise easily. I enjoyed them. I understood them. I remember what happened in them. Those I watched at home were different. I spent most of Frankenstein scrolling through Instagram stories on the sofa and then judged it as “like, fine, I guess?” to my long-suffering, non-phone-addicted boyfriend. During Bugonia, I watched TikToks of people making Japanese cheesecake and then had to Google “Bugonia ending explained” on incognito mode, which is debasing.

In my defence, some people are even worse than I am. Our attention spans are now so boggled that plenty of us can’t even make it to the cinema without watching other content or even more deranged, making content ourselves. As I watched 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple at the cinema last week, a couple next to me had a protracted conversation at full volume about the takeaway they were going to order afterwards, interspersed with questions about what was happening in the film we had all paid £12 to watch together. Later, when I got home and returned to my beloved phone, my For You page on TikTok was filled with videos of people filming the movie’s shocking scenes in the actual cinema with lots of “oh shits” and “no ways” to review them in real time.

Maybe it’s hypocritical for me to look down my nose at this lack of cinema etiquette, just like it’s hypocritical for me to look down my nose at long runtimes while being pathologically unable to focus for more than 90 minutes. After all, I grew up benefitting from hard-working people who smuggled their camcorders into cinemas and sold my dad pirate DVDs, and I am grateful to those people and their ingenuity because it allowed me to watch Minority Report when I was definitely too young to do so. It pains me to become a “kids these days” person, complaining about how movies and audiences have lost their way while also being part of the problem.

How do we solve that problem? How do we save cinema etiquette, while also making movies we can all watch and enjoy without having the ending explained to us five times in the script, or requiring a Subway Surfers video to run below the protagonist’s tortured monologue? It’s simple. We return to the 90-minute movie. We stop asking too much of people, and get more from them in return.

I don’t think this is dumbing down; I think it’s optimising. I’m sure Killers of the Flower Moon is a great movie, but I’ll never watch it because it’s more than three hours long. I have a weak bladder and I need to check my WhatsApps!