This again seems like something that different people could interpret differently.
I usually watch movies on my computer, and when I think they are too slow, I increase the speed. (If I no longer understand the speech at the high speed, I add subtitles.) Recently, I usually watch a movie on 2x speed, and slow down if there is some action scene or a nontrivial dialogue. Speed up if too boring.
Seems to me that most (but not all) movies follow the same pacing, where during the first half of the movie almost nothing happened, we just get the protagonist introduced. Then things start happening, then they get more dramatic, then there is the climax, then a short cool down and the movie ends.
Now, is this “pacing that keeps lower attention spans engaged”? For me, the first half of such movie is the one that watch at 2x or 3x speed, and if I didn’t have an option to do that or to skip that part, I probably would not have watched many of the movies (so I would never learn that the second half was good).
I suspect the desired psychological outcome is more like: “people remember the end of the movie most, so let’s push everything interesting as close to the end as possible”. And a possible bet that if they are in a cinema (where the producent probably gets most money), people won’t leave during the first half.
With old movies, the pacing seems more like the slow and fast sections alternate throughout the film.
Although there seems to have been a slight dip/stagnation in the 2000s and 2010s, and the text concludes with
In conclusion, our intuition was wrong. There is no trend in the movies runtime. The differences are too small to be noticed. We can say that for the last 60 years movies on average have the same length. No matter what criteria we take into account, the result is the same.
Interesting. The graph seems to fit Viliam’s intuition rather well. It is a noisy dataset (not to mention that “movie” is probably a poorly defined item so might have both apples and oranges here) so I’m not quite sure one can easily make the claim of increasing or constant very easily.
You might find some of the discussion here of interest on the subject. This listing of John Wayne movies, with run time listed might also be of interest.
I have been under the impression that they had been getting shorter—say from the 70s to the 90s/00s but then started lengthening again a bit somewhat after that until now. Nothing very scientific about my recollection of that observation though.
I always assumed this was a shift due to VCRs, DVDs, and then DVRs and streaming. Today media can assume everyone can watch anything as often as they want. Older media had to assume no one would ever watch it more than once, or be able to look up anything they missed. Old movies and TV shows are simple in the stories they tell, simpler in dialog, and shorter in length, so you can mostly catch everything the first time through.
Movies in general require very little attention compared to just listening or even reading. Since they are audiovisual, they leave very little to the imagination. So I expect other influences have a larger effect.
I think that movies are getting longer.
I didn’t check this systematically, but it feels like old movies are about 80 minutes long, and the recent ones are approaching 120 minutes.
This could just be a function of film directors getting better at making long films with pacing that keeps lower attention spans engaged.
Yeah, there’s all these damn confounders :-|
This again seems like something that different people could interpret differently.
I usually watch movies on my computer, and when I think they are too slow, I increase the speed. (If I no longer understand the speech at the high speed, I add subtitles.) Recently, I usually watch a movie on 2x speed, and slow down if there is some action scene or a nontrivial dialogue. Speed up if too boring.
Seems to me that most (but not all) movies follow the same pacing, where during the first half of the movie almost nothing happened, we just get the protagonist introduced. Then things start happening, then they get more dramatic, then there is the climax, then a short cool down and the movie ends.
Now, is this “pacing that keeps lower attention spans engaged”? For me, the first half of such movie is the one that watch at 2x or 3x speed, and if I didn’t have an option to do that or to skip that part, I probably would not have watched many of the movies (so I would never learn that the second half was good).
I suspect the desired psychological outcome is more like: “people remember the end of the movie most, so let’s push everything interesting as close to the end as possible”. And a possible bet that if they are in a cinema (where the producent probably gets most money), people won’t leave during the first half.
With old movies, the pacing seems more like the slow and fast sections alternate throughout the film.
I looks like movies have been getting longer:
Although there seems to have been a slight dip/stagnation in the 2000s and 2010s, and the text concludes with
Interesting. The graph seems to fit Viliam’s intuition rather well. It is a noisy dataset (not to mention that “movie” is probably a poorly defined item so might have both apples and oranges here) so I’m not quite sure one can easily make the claim of increasing or constant very easily.
You might find some of the discussion here of interest on the subject. This listing of John Wayne movies, with run time listed might also be of interest.
I have been under the impression that they had been getting shorter—say from the 70s to the 90s/00s but then started lengthening again a bit somewhat after that until now. Nothing very scientific about my recollection of that observation though.
I always assumed this was a shift due to VCRs, DVDs, and then DVRs and streaming. Today media can assume everyone can watch anything as often as they want. Older media had to assume no one would ever watch it more than once, or be able to look up anything they missed. Old movies and TV shows are simple in the stories they tell, simpler in dialog, and shorter in length, so you can mostly catch everything the first time through.
Movies in general require very little attention compared to just listening or even reading. Since they are audiovisual, they leave very little to the imagination. So I expect other influences have a larger effect.