Movies generally have an accepted time range, from around 90 minutes to just over two hours, but in or outside that range, the length of a film has a huge effect on its pacing and impact. Unfortunately, Marvel and DC have eschewed the tight 90-minute action movie in favor of increasingly bloated running times.

Recently, the runtime of Matt Reeves's upcoming film The Batman was revealed to be 2 hours and 47 minutes before the end credits. This would make the film the third-longest running superhero film yet released, but it also serves as a hallmark of a distressing ongoing trend.

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As of the release of Eternals last year, the entirety of the Marvel Cinematic Universe film saga would take a whopping 59 hours and 29 minutes to watch. That's 27 films with an average running time of 2 hours and 12 minutes. The DC Extended Universe, on the other hand, would take a total of 26 hours and 28 minutes. About half the runtime of the MCU, but with only 11 films, leading to a higher average running time of 2 hours and 24 minutes.

Zack-Snyder's-Justice-League-Batman-Joker

Of course, the totals and averages are slightly weighted by the outliers, the two longest superhero films of all time. Marvel's Avengers: Endgame sat just over 3 hours. This was theoretically justified by the fact that the film was a triumphant fireworks display celebrating the franchise's success, but it was still an unwieldy beast of a film. Fans were sharing bathroom break schedules because simple human biology would disallow most from enjoying the whole thing in one sitting. DC's longest project trumps even that length with the ridiculous 4 hours and 2-minute runtime of Zack Snyder's Justice League. These are outliers, but the entirety of the genre has a problem with restraint in this department.

Pacing is so important when it comes to action movies, and perhaps even more so when it comes to the superhero movie subgenre. Superhero movies are expected to divide their time between the action and the more domestic aspects of the hero's life, and striking a balance there is key. If a superhero movie lets the pace fall flat, it can be impossible to regain an audience's attention once it's been lost.

The longer a film runs, the harder it can become to keep an audience consistently engaged throughout. Some films are better put together than others, sometimes it's extremely easy to determine where cuts can be made, other times the entire film feels essential. Obviously, a short film is not inherently better than a long film, but one measure of quality is whether a film justifies the time investment it takes up. The longer the film goes on, the more space needs to be filled.

A great example of the power of an expedient running time is John Wick. At 1 hour and 41 minutes, it's shorter than the shortest of both Marvel and DC's catalogs. While the sequels both expanded beyond the two-hour mark, the original John Wick is a tight, well-paced, non-stop action thrill ride. There's little to no time wasted in this film, it's hard to imagine any substantial cuts being made. While Wick isn't a superhero movie, it's one of the defining voices in action cinema of the modern age.

By establishing its narrative stakes, backstory, internal mythology, and simple narrative with efficiency, John Wick cuts out any fluff that could distract from the main draw of the film. Most superhero movies are based around characters that fans already know and love. In fact, when it comes to Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, or the other biggest names, it would be hard to imagine anyone who hasn't heard the basics of the heroes. Even when the heroes are less well known, some filmmakers can do some impressive work with pacing.

Guardians of the Galaxy Cropped

Perhaps the best-paced superhero movie of recent memory is James Gunn's 2014 film Guardians of the Galaxy. In an impressive feat, the film introduces five previously unknown heroes, establishes their personal journeys, establishes the threat, and plays out an epic adventure all in almost exactly 2 hours. Ten minutes short of the MCU average, Guardians has a ton of faith in its audience to both keep up and play along with Gunn's colorful universe. 7 years later, Eternals attempts the same feat, with substantially less success and an additional 35 minutes. The issue here is two-fold and is likely to continue to detract from otherwise solid films.

As the competing empires of Marvel and DC expand ever-outward, the films will continue to run longer. It's not unreasonable to imagine the next Infinity War-style finale divided into two four-hour chunks or the next Justice League reaching five or six hours. This expansion can be contained, Birds of Prey for example was released in 2020 and came in at a restrained 109 minutes. As superhero movies show no sign of stopping, let's all hope that the future holds more well-paced stories and less bloated sagas.

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