The Batman with Robert Pattinson will 175 minutes long its. Let’s get this on the tip of our tongue.
That’s 2 hours and 55 minutes or 10.500 seconds.
You can fit two soccer games or eight episodes of Friends into 175 minutes. EIGHT.
You could drive from Berlin to Hannover in that time and still have an hour to regret your decision.
Why does a blockbuster have to be so long, let alone the youthful pranks of Bruce Wayne? Especially in the case of this Batman the running time seems absurd. Also with a first class actor like Robert Pattinson in the leading role.
- Already seen? The first extended scene from The Batman leaves even Robert Pattinson speechless
Blockbusters in overlength are unfortunately the norm
The bad thing about the news about the running time of The Batman is that it came with announcement. Blockbusters always become longer.
- Nearly all Marvel movies in 2021 were over 130 minutes long, with Eternals peaking at 156 minutes. The only exception is Venom: Let There Be Carnage, about which many things can be said, but not that it should have been longer.
- The same goes for DC movies that came to Germany in 2021.
- James Bond 007 – No Time to Die was, after nearly 60 years of franchise history, the longest Bond film with 163 minutes.
- Dune, in which the first half (!) of a book is adapted, took 156 minutes for sandcastle building.
Check out the trailer for The Batman:
The point here is not to make a case for 90-minute films. This train left the blockbuster cinema decades ago. Let’s take the 130 mark again, then the development can also be made clear in this way:
- In the Top 10 most successful films of the 1980s there are two films over 130 minutes. (Rain Man and Return of the Jedi Knights, if you’re curious)
- In the 90s there are five films.
- In the 2000s there are even nine films, thanks to Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean.
- In the 2010s there are seven. A couple of kids’ movies save the day.
Some films earn the running time, but most probably don’t
Blockbusters are not soccer matches in terms of length, but Five-set matches at Wimbledon. It is part of our everyday life to go to the cinema for such a long time that in between states collapse, the seasons change and children speak their first words (my guess is: "overlength supplement").
Blockbuster highlights 2022 in video:
That’s not particularly practical, and few blockbusters justify a runtime beyond two hours. With a 180-minute film like Avengers 4: Endgame, one can still be lenient in view of the story, just as with the Bond farewell with Daniel Craig. Theoretically, they have a lot to tell.
But does anyone seriously think that Fast& Furious 9 has fifteen minutes more to tell than Fast& Furious Five? Fifteen minutes you might as well be hitting the washing machine or scratching the dog?
The running time of The Batman with Robert Pattinson is absurd
Now The Batman, which with its 175 minutes is longer than Spiel mir das Lied vom Tod (!) and Boyhood. Richard Linklater can 12 years in the life of a boy in less time than Matt Reeves tell a year in the life of a comic book hero who beats up the Riddler and Penguin.
The Batman has been billed as a return to the character’s origins, specifically his role as a detective. Only the detective film is not exactly praised for its length. In an interview with Moviemaker
Matt Reeves mentions The Incorruptibles, Klute and Chinatown as role models. They use their screentime wisely to maintain paranoia and suspense. Along the way they tell an enormous amount about their era. Similarly, L.A. Confidential, Memories of Murder or Memento.
Even David Fincher’s Zodiac, whose real-life killer is the obvious model for the new Riddler (Paul Dano), is 20 minutes shorter than The Batman. 20 minutes in which you could be cleaning the windows or listening to the budgerigar.
Now, the strange thing about the Bat thing is that The Batman actually announced as a standalone film was. This would theoretically free him from the usual tasks that bloat a franchise film these days. Nevertheless it is 175 minutes long.
Why blockbusters from recent years are so long?
The Reasons for runtime inflation in blockbuster cinema are in fact manifold. They range from the simplified distribution of films with digital copies (versus heavy film reels) to the dominance of the franchise narrative. Blockbusters, for one, can rarely stand on their own anymore because they have to prepare their sequels.
Second, they have to top their predecessors, for example by pitting five villains and three multiversal versions of a hero against each other. Third, they drag a rat’s tail of franchise mythology behind them.
The above lists of top-grossing films aren’t chosen at random, though. For that Audience accepts these debauched narratives. This may be due to our habituation to series binges. Or else at the understandable desire to get something for the money as ticket prices rise. It should be noted here that movies are not shopping carts that automatically increase in value with duplicate content.
The Batman runtime shows where the journey is headed
Short movies sometimes feel like an eternity and long movies go by like a sitcom episode. So The Batman could be a great movie, like the 170-minute Heat.
It could remove any doubts about why it needs to be 50 minutes longer than the standalone Joker. 50 minutes in which to write a passive-aggressive email to your landlord or beg for your cat’s attention.
But it could also be just a milestone of a Be a development that’s a long time coming. In a few years, it may be part of the average just like Avengers: Endgame. Then we come out of the movies like Matthew McConaughey standing at the bedside of his aged movie daughter in the finale of Interstellar. A blockbuster, which incidentally is also shorter than The Batman.