Some other reasons movies are so long these days.

In the 1980s, CDs became the music industry standard for album releases. Even though CDs were smaller than the vinyl LPs they replaced, they could hold more music. A twelve-inch record can hold 45 minutes (give or take) of music, while a CD can hold more than 70 minutes of music. Some musicians decided that their albums needed to fill up a CD, even if they didn’t have 70 minutes of good music ready, and we got a lot of hour-long albums that would have been a lot better if they’d been edited down to 40 minutes.

I’ve been thinking about the overlong albums of the ’80s and ’90s lately because of the overlong movies of the 2020s.

I am certainly not the first person to complain that movies are too long these days. Vanity Fair published a piece on the subject last year. The Vanity Fair article mentions that producers and cinema owners and audiences complain about long movies. But those complaints don’t carry as much weight as they used to, and I can think of a couple of reasons for that.

For theatrical distribution, digital projection has drastically changed the cost of “prints.” Twenty years ago when most cinemas were showing film prints, it cost a lot of money to make all of those film prints. And you pay for film prints by the foot, so a two-and-a-half-hour print is more expensive than a 90-minute print. And those prints are bulky — a 90-minute 35mm print is like eight thousand feet long, broken up into five reels. Those reels are heavy and have to be shipped all around the country and assembled for a projector.

Because of the costs involved, a given cinema would only get a set number of prints of a given film. So long movies would get fewer screenings per day. So that’s fewer tickets sold for a popular movie, and fewer tickets means fewer people buying popcorn and Cokes.

With digital distribution, none of that really comes into play. Whether a movie is 90 minutes long or three hours long, the disk drive it is shipped on is the same size and weight. And disk drives are cheap (or at least they’re a lot cheaper than ten thousand feet of film), so it’s no problem to send out multiple disks to any given cinema, especially for a popular movie.

In the 20th century, even super popular movies would only show on one or two screens at a given cinema, and sometimes you just couldn’t get tickets — a movie would be sold out all day. That happens less often when a cinema can show the same movie on four or five screens. And if a movie is long and can only be shown three times a day instead of four, a cinema can make up the difference by just adding a screen.

All that said, most movies these days are more likely to be seen on a streaming service than at a cinema. Whether that’s good or bad is debatable, but cinemas are famously doing less business these days, and streaming options like Netflix and Hulu and Disney Plus are plentiful. And I’m not sure how all of these services pay for their movies. But I have experience dealing with Tubi and Amazon Prime, and I know both of those services pay filmmakers (or distributors) based on the number of minutes streamed.

So if you have a movie on Tubi and somebody watches twenty minutes of it, you’ll make two pennies or whatever (I’m not sure what the exact rates are these days, but it takes a lot of minutes to make a buck in the movie streaming game). If your movie is 90 minutes long, a single viewing is going to net you a nickel or whatever.

You can see where this is going, right?

If your movie is three hours long, it is theoretically twice as valuable as a 90-minute movie on Tubi, because if somebody watches the whole thing, you get a dime instead of a nickel. I say theoretically because there is a lot of competition on Tubi. It’s hard to get someone to watch twenty minutes of your movie, much less your whole movie. And I imagine if your movie is three hours long, it is less likely to be viewed in its entirety than a 90-minute movie.

But, theoretically, a longer movie is a more valuable streaming commodity than a shorter one.

The Vanity Fair piece I linked to at the top of this post mentions epic films from Oscar-winning directors like Martin Scorsese and Damien Chazelle. I’m not trying to say that those guys are making long movies to scrape a few more bucks out of an eventual Pluto TV deal. Ambitious filmmakers (especially ambitious filmmakers with a proven track record) have been making epic movies for a hundred years now.

But does our current streaming-centric movie business make it easier for filmmakers (including filmmakers who maybe don’t have a proven track record) to produce a two-and-a-half-hour movie than it was ten or fifteen years ago? Yeah, I think it probably does.