10 Things Everyone Hates About Modern Movies

Hasn't it felt like movies, particularly blockbusters, have been getting increasingly long over the last decade-or-so?

Obviously there have always been epic tentpoles like Braveheart and Titanic, but now more than ever it feels like so many big-scale movies want to over-indulge with hyper-complex, labyrinthine villain plots which extend their runtime to well over two hours.

When did a tight 110-130 minutes ever become such a bad thing? Did anyone on Earth really need Spectre of all things to be 148 minutes long? And with the upcoming No Time to Die clocking in at a brutal 163 minutes, the trend isn't going anywhere.

Obviously no great movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough, but one suspects that with theatrically released movies needing to remain competitive against streaming, more expansive runtimes may be part of an attempt to offer the perception of greater minutes-per-dollar value.

Ironically, streaming also allows filmmakers greater breathing room to indulge their every whim.

Streamers like Netflix have a famously hands-off approach with their directors, which is why we end up with mediocre genre films like The Last Days of American Crime running in at 149 soul-draining minutes.

Now, Avengers: Endgame more-or-less justified its three-hour length, and Martin Scorsese's The Irishman might well be the most swift 209 minutes ever committed to film, but these are stark outliers.

Brevity is the soul of wit - kill your darlings, be ruthlessly unsentimental with your cuts, and avoid a lukewarm word-of-mouth because everyone found your movie too long.

For instance, as people scramble to explain In the Heights' disappointing box office performance, could it not simply be that people didn't want to spend 143 minutes watching a relatively niche musical in the cinema, especially when they could watch it on HBO Max with snack and bathroom breaks?