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.