Interstellar’s Other Space-Time Problem: At 169 Minutes, It’s Too Long to Be a Hit, How many minutes does a movie have to run before potential viewers say, “Screw that, I’ll wait for it on Netflix”? It’s a question Christopher Nolan has been exploring, however inadvertently, for the past few years.
Nolan has not directed a movie under two hours since 2002’s Insomnia. And since then, four of his last five films have brought in more than $200 million at the domestic box office. The Dark Knight Rises, a robust 165 minutes of Bane-breathing, made $448 million in North American theaters. Inception tested the limits of consciousness at 148 minutes. So you could hardly blame Nolan when the final cut of his space-travel drama Interstellar clocked in at 169 minutes, even if time does slow down as you approach the speed of light.
Yet Interstellar underperformed in its opening weekend ($47.5 million domestically, vs. a projected $50 million), and at least one trade publication suggested that the movie’s length was in part to blame. By the end of its second weekend in theaters, when it was beaten by Dumber and Dumber To, the film had not yet cracked the $100 million benchmark, though it performed well overseas.
In an attempt to find the upper limit of a hit film’s running time, Bloomberg Businessweek looked at the lengths of every movie that’s grossed more than $100 million at the domestic box office. We did not adjust for inflation, so most of the films shown below are fairly new.
The majority of blockbusters run between 90 and 150 minutes. Only 18 were as long or longer than Interstellar. Of course, that doesn’t mean a long movie is destined to fail. It just means big hits tend to be shorter.
We also looked at the average length of a $100 million movie for every year in which there was one, and found that although there’s been a slight uptick in running times since 2010, the average 2014 hit is still about 51 minutes shorter than Interstellar.
But doesn’t it feel as if tentpoles are getting longer? According to our data, if there’s a wizard, an Iron Man, or a Jennifer Lawrence on-screen, settle in and don’t drink too much soda.
