105 Days until Oscar Night! Let's talk running times.
Sunday, November 11, 2018 at 11:00AM by Nathaniel R
Did you know that only two Best Picture winners ever have been 105 minutes long? Well, now you do. They were It Happened One Night (1934) and Kramer vs Kramer (1979). We hope you are wise enough to love both of them. When we first listed the Best Picture winners from longest to shortest by length four years ago we realized that the average Best Picture winner length was a whopping 138 minutes long. Since then, rather shockingly, given how longwinded storytellers on TV and in film are getting, all four of the new winners have been shorter than that...
Average Best Picture Length, 1927-2013 (138 minutes)
Average Best Picture Winner Length, 2014-2017 (120 minutes)
Moonlight is the 14th shortest Best Picture winner
- Spotlight (129 minutes)
- The Shape of Water (123 minutes)
- Birdman (119 minutes)
- Moonlight (111 minutes)
But it's going to take a lot more relatively tight best pictures to bring that Entire Oscar History average running time down. In 90 years there have only been three best picture winners under 100 minutes: Driving Miss Daisy (I know, I know... I thought it was 4 hours long, too), Annie Hall, and Marty. If you allow for Sunrise, given the weirdness of the 1st Oscars with their separate categories for Picture and Artistic Production, it's four films. In short, it's very rare for a reasonably lengthed movie to win!
Here are the running times of 2018 films that are surely hoping to be competitive for major prizes this season at either the Globes, Spirits, critics awards, or Oscars (or all four) from longest to shortest:
A Star is Born, Roma, and BlacKkKlansman are typical lengths as Best Picture winners go
- First Man (141 minutes)
- A Star is Born (136 minutes)
- Roma (135 minutes)
- BlacKkKlansman (135 minutes)
- Black Panther (134 minutes)
- Green Book (130 minutes)
- Widows (129 minutes)
- Crazy Rich Asians (120 minutes)
- The Favourite (119 minutes)
- Incredibles 2 (118 minutes)
- If Beale Street Could Talk (117 minutes)
- Boy Erased (114 minutes)
- First Reformed (113 minutes)
- Can You Ever Forgive Me? (106 minutes)
- Isle of Dogs (101 minutes)
- Eighth Grade (93 minutes)
- A Quiet Place (90 minutes)
- Cold War (88 minutes)
UNKNOWN LENGTHS: Mary Poppins Returns, Vice, Mary Queen of Scots, and The Mule... but we're guessing over 2 hours for all of them with the possible exception of Mary Poppins Returns since Rob Marshall's previous musicals have hovered right around / just under the 2 hour mark.
Reader Comments (11)
Mid90s is only 84 minutes.
So strike out any under 100 minute films that won't have a winning lead performance, gotcha.
According to this new era of 110 minutes, First Reformed is the front-runner
I don't care how long a movie is as long as it doesn't feel long. Apparently for Nathaniel, Driving Miss Daisy feels long even though its running time is short. For me, A Man For All Seasons (120 minutes) feels neverending, but another talk-heavy best picture, Spotlight (129 minutes), felt tight and every scene essential the whole way.
Cal -- no, that'd be Crazy Rich Asians, exactly 120 minutes ;)
Cash -- this is true of course but in truth most movies that are over 2 hours feel like they could be trimmed (to me at least). Rare is the picture that feels like it needs to be over that length and yet the bulk of them are!
Like, I could edit all Nolan movies to 90 minutes, but, for example, Toni Erdmann and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia have earned their 3 hour long running time. This is very particular. I know people who say Gone With The Wind or Lawrence of Arabia are long. Please! We can't use some directors' lack of self-editing to justify the audience's impatience. Baby cinephiles nowadays love to complain about movies being slow or too long.
Movies now are just too long- almost every film can be improved with a shorter running time
I've seen Gaga on her knees singing Born This Way to a kid and I've read Emily Blunt saying that Mary Poppins will unify America so what it really feels long to me is the Oscar campaign.
First Man definitely felt like 141 minutes. Zzzz
I wonder if the shorter running times has anything to do with peak TV? Now that most of the stigma against TV is gone, a creative team/director can choose either TV or the movies to show off their ideas.
This is in particular the reason I don't begrudge any long running times from the pre-TV era. Gone With The Wind needed all that time for such a sprawling story, and you couldn't have captured all that great color cinematography and the music in The Sound of Music without that intermission. ;-)
A lot of 90s Disney movies have about an 80 minute running time so I accepted that as standard for the most part