Clare Binns, the creative director of Picturehouse Cinemas, has called for shorter movies to be made (via The Guardian).
Binns, who will receive the Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema Award at this year's EE BAFTA Film Awards, said: "I talk to producers about this and say: 'Tell the director you're making the film for an audience, not the directors.'"
"There's always exceptions, but I look at a lot of films and think: 'You could take 20 minutes out of that.' There's no need for films to be that long."
"It means you only get one evening show," Binns added. "I think it's a wake-up call to directors. If they want their films in cinemas, people have to feel comfortable about what they're committing to."
A topic which has sparked mass debate, the notion of longer runtimes has been widely discussed by directors and other industry professionals in recent years. Adding food for thought, earlier this week, Paul Thomas Anderson's crime drama, One Battle After Another (2025), bagged 13 Oscar nominations, despite clocking in at 162 minutes, suggesting that there is still an interest in longer films.
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Likewise, director Brady Corbet, whose 215-minute period drama, The Brutalist (2024), won three Academy Awards last year, noted that it was "silly" to scrutinise the length of movies. "This film does everything that we are told we are not allowed to do," he said of The Brutalist (via Variety).
"I think it's quite silly, actually, to have a conversation about runtime because that's like criticising a book for being 700 pages instead of 100 pages. Maybe the next thing I make will be 45 minutes, and I should be allowed to do it. We should all be allowed to do that. The idea we have to fit into a box is quite silly."
Likewise, Hollywood icon Martin Scorsese, whose 206-minute epic, Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), received 10 Oscar nominations in 2024, has weighed in. "People say it's three hours, but come on, you can sit in front of the TV and watch something for five hours," he said to the Hindustan Times.
"Also, there are many people who watch theatre for 3.5 hours. There are real actors on stage, you can't get up and walk around. You give it that respect, give cinema some respect."
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