There’s an unspoken contract between a long movie and its audience, and Hollywood keeps breaking it. More than two hours in a theater seat is a commitment, and many Americans have already made up their minds that the product isn’t delivering.
A new survey of 2,000 Americans from Talker Research found that the ideal movie length is 88 minutes—a number that will make anyone who’s sat through a three-hour superhero franchise installment feel personally vindicated. That’s not even an hour and a half. Only 10% of respondents said two hours or more is acceptable, and a mere 3% would voluntarily sign up for anything over two and a half hours.
The number has also been sliding. When Talker Research ran the same survey in 2024, the ideal came in at 92 minutes. Americans have lost four minutes of patience in two years, a slide that lines up with what film industry analyst Stephen Follows found after crunching the runtimes of more than 36,000 theatrically released films. Wide-release movies averaged around 106 minutes in the 1990s and early 2000s. By the current decade, that figure had crept up to 114 minutes, according to his research cited by The Hollywood Reporter. In the 1980s, 14% of wide releases ran over two hours. That number has since jumped to 32%.
So audiences want less, and studios keep delivering more. Great system.
Americans Say the Ideal Movie Is Only 88 Minutes Long
The generational breakdown is telling. Boomers will tolerate up to 93 minutes on average, Gen X drops to 89, millennials land at 86, and Gen Z comes in at 82. The direction of travel is pretty clear: each generation has less time for this than the last.
This summer’s theatrical lineup isn’t exactly reading the room. Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey runs 172 minutes—nearly double the stated ideal. Spider-Man: Brand New Day runs 150 minutes, and Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day runs 145 minutes. Meanwhile, the films that actually hit the sweet spot include Minions & Monsters at 90 minutes and Jackass: Best and Last at 92. Toy Story 5 runs 102 minutes, which is almost 21 minutes longer than the original 1995 Toy Story.
For context, Airplane!, The Lion King, Zombieland, and The Producers all run right around 88 minutes—and nobody has ever complained that any of them felt too short.
The gap between what people actually want from a night at the movies and what Hollywood keeps putting in front of them continues to grow. Whether that changes anything remains to be seen.