Average Runtime of Each Decade's Top Movies

Check this out: someone's compiled the average runtime of each decade's Top 50 movies (as voted on by IMDB users, at least):

Pretty interesting stuff. The biggest change is from the 10s to the 20s; I'm guessing the increasing popularity of "talkies" probably had a lot to do with that. Also interesting to see that it's pretty much held steady for the last 40 years or so.

So, what kind of conclusions do you think we can draw from this? That truly great stories take awhile to tell, and that early on we simply lacked the technology and production values to do so properly?

I have seen some running times that include closing credits and some that do not, do you know which the case is for those stats? it is interesting because many of todays closing credits seem to take quite a long time. Just wondering?

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The guy who compiled this got the runtimes from IMDB, so it'd depend on how they determine them, I suppose.

I think two hours is a perfect runtime for most movies, but of course it is not an absolute. I think genre also plays a part, a great comedy or slasher film (there are a few arent there?) does not usually need a long runtime. It is interesting how it has pretty much stayed about the same for such a long time.

Well I don't know that the rankings on the IMDb are any great source of anything. But if you go by Best Picture Oscar winners, you see that the big prestige pictures were always longer. The first flick to ever win Best Picture, Wings, was a Silent but it was also 139 minutes long, which would have been considered an epic in those days....though already much shorter than some of the pre-Oscar epics like Griffith's Birth of a Nation which ran about three hours or Erich von Stroheim's legendary Greed (1924) which in its fabled pre-cut version ran for some nine hours, was cut down to five, then taken by the Studio and re-cut again to two and a quarter hours.



But back to the Best Pictures. For the ten winners released in the 1930s, the average running time was 137 minutes! That included Gone with the Wind at 226 minutes and The Great Ziegfeld at 176, but also had the comedy It Happened One Night at the low end running just 105 minutes. In the 1940s the average length of the Best Picture actually decreased to 127 minutes. You still had a couple long ones in The Best Years of Our Lives and Olivier's Hamlet, but five of the winners were under two hours including the shortest The Lost Weekend and Casablanca, 101 and 102 minutes respectively.

In the 1950s with the increasing popularity of television and a swift decrease in the number of movie ticket sales the industry brought in the various widescreen processes and tried to make going out to the cinema a big event again. Ben-Hur (1959) at 212 minutes and Around the World in 80 Days at 167 minutes typify this kind of epic filmmaking, including a scheduled intermission, which came to be called a "Road Show", which meant they played in the biggest theatres and you bought tickets with numbered seats in advance, like a Broadway show. The '50s had some shorter, smaller movies win Best Picture too, of course, including Marty, adapted from a television movie, that ran just 91 minutes (shortest Best Picture ever). But with Ben-Hur, Around the World in 80 Days, The Greatest Show On Earth and The Bridge On the River Kwai the average for the '50s increased from the 1940s by ten minutes to 137.



In the 1960s the Road Show was even a bigger part of the Hollywood machine, and with the epic, expensive Musicals The Sound of Music (174 minutes), My Fair Lady (170 minutes), Oliver! (153 minutes) and West Side Story (152 minutes) plus Lawrence of Arabia coming in at nearly four hours, the average length of the Best Picture went up again to 147 minutes! That's about two and a half hours, if you're as bad at math as I am. But the 1960s also had In the Heat of the Night at only 109 minutes and Midnight Cowboy at 113 minutes.

In the 1970s even though the Road Show format died away, big epics without intermissions still often got Oscar gold with The Godfather (175 minutes), The Godfather Part II (200 minutes), The Deer Hunter (182 minutes) and Patton (170 minutes). But those bohemoths were balanced out a bit by four that were under two hours: The French Connection, Rocky, Kramer vs. Kramer and Annie Hall, which ran only 93 minutes. But the average for the decade held pretty constant at 141 minutes. The 1980s had four older style gigantic epics in Gandhi (188 minutes), The Last Emperor (160 minutes), Amadeus (160 minutes) and Out of Africa (150 minutes), and even though Driving Miss Daisy was just 99 minutes, all of the other Best Pictures were at or over two hours so the decade's average decreased only three minutes to 139.



The 1990s saw the greatest average yet, fueled by truly long epics in Schindler's List (195 minutes), Dances with Wolves (180 minutes), Braveheart (177 minutes), The English Patient (162 minutes), Forrest Gump (142 minutes) and of course Titanic (194 minutes). There was only one winner that clocked in under two hours and that was The Silence of the Lambs at 118 minutes. The average length for the '90s was 154 minutes! It has actually decreased so far in this decade, with two films to go. And that is in spite of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King at 201 frippin' minutes. Both Chicago and Crash are under two hours, and so far this century has begun with Best Pictures averaging 140 minutes, shaving off fourteen minutes of butt-numbing from the '90s.




So to put those numbers together...

1930s = 137 minutes
1940s = 127 minutes
1950s = 137 minutes
1960s = 147 minutes
1970s = 141 minutes
1980s = 139 minutes
1990s = 154 minutes
2000s = 140 minutes

While movies seem longer today, and in general they are, this decade's Best Picture winners are tracking right about along with the Best Picture winners from the 1930s and 1950s.


But if you want to get into average running length of movies just in general, not just the "best" or "top" by whatever criteria you're choosing, you'll find there have always been some that are very short, often comedies or smaller budgeted genre pics, and some that are very long, being the big budget projects that used to be called "A" pictures by the Studios and are now referred to as the "tent poles".

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Running times always include end credits. That's one of the reasons movies are longer now since the end credits run longer, but I posted earlier and a researcher friend of mine has the numbers which show that the average running time of movies in the last 35 years has gone up about 12-15 minutes, and the added credit length doesn't account for that. Just look at "fun family films"; for example, the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy (143 m, 150 m, 168 m). Why does it take so long to tell these film's "stories"? Compare Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) at 90 minutes to Superbad (2007) at 114 minutes. I realize it's not fair to pick and choose because you can do that in such a way to skew the way things are, but I don't see why many recent films need to be so long. They aren't really trying to earn any Oscars or prestigous awards.

Maybe I'll come back when I have more time to discuss this further because it is interesting if applied to a concept of how people perceive differences in films, based on their release date, country of origin, genre/subject matter, certification rating, cast, director, and running time.

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I don't think there's enough information available in run times to make any sort of conclusions, Yoda. Weren't most of the films in the early years of the 20th century short one-reelers like the Keystone Cops? But then there were big epics like Greed and Intolerance among the top-rated films that in their original form were longer than many of today's films. Plus among the old silents, how much time was occupied by actual scenes in the movie and how much by signs of "dialogue" or explanation that were posted for seemingly long times for audiences who were not adept at reading?

As for the impact of technology, I'd like to see a comparative list of run times since Bullet debuted and everyone started filming those interminable car chase scenes.

Personally I think the wise producer would tailor the length of movies to how much discomfort one's butt can tolerate vs. how much information one's mind can absorb.

This is a perfectly fair point, though we can check on some of this ourselves by generally perusing IMDB's rankings to see what sort of films were included. What these numbers lack in sample size, they make up for in ease-of-auditing.

This would actually serve to make the silent films even longer, though, so we'd still be left with many of the same conclusions about the sudden increase in length.

Agreed on all counts. This isn't exhaustive and you can make a good case, as Holden does, for using other measures. Though the fact that the Best Picture numbers are so different early on does indicate quite a disconnect between what was winning accolades at the time, and what we still esteem almost a century later.

Not necessarily, if as you say there wasn't so much difference in running times overall. That would just mean less "motion picture" and more cutlines shown in the same few minutes. I'm sure you've seen some silent movies in which there were few or no cutlines and the action therefore seems to whiz by.

I confess: you've lost me here. I made a general statement about how the times have held steady the last few decades, but that wasn't in reference to silent films. Unless I'm misunderstanding you (quite possible).

Anyway, whether or not swapping titlecards for actual dialogue in some old silent films would shift the average much, I can't say, but it obviously wouldn't make them longer, so we'd still be left with the conclusion that there was a big jump from the 10s to the 20s.

Is there a story behind why they started calling them "tent poles"? I don't know what that means.

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Nowadays, tent poles mean something which support a group or studio (say, a big moneymaking franchise), but if you take it back to the concept of road show movies in the 1950s, it's almost synonymous. Road show films came to down, put down their tent poles and then moved on. Now, the reality was, they originally set up their tent poles in the largest cities and then drifted to smaller ones, then towns, etc. It all kind of reminds me of Sister Sharon Falconer's revival in the awesome Elmer Gantry, set in the 1920s.

I did not know that. So there was like, roving movie houses? I knew about the revival stuff, but they did that with movies too?

No. It was more of a platforming event. The thing was, in the 1950s, only certain theatres could properly display the Cinerama or Cinemascope presentation in "Todd-A-O" sound, etc. So, the films would start at the theatres which could do them proud, and then they'd move on to smaller venues and cities. Holden's "tent poles" have nothing to do with "Road Shows". I drew that parallel myself.