In an interview earlier this year with The Times, Villenueve was asked about the most recent iteration of the unkillable runtime gripe. In 1992, Ebert was responding to moviegoers put off by the daunting three-hour-plus lengths of “Dances with Wolves” and “JFK” (both of which were commercial successes). Throughout the 2000s, runtime scolds wrung their impatient hands over the expanding scope of the Harry Potter films (which matched the steadily increasing page count of J.K. Rowling’s books), and they carped anew a decade later when the MCU closed out its “Infinity Saga” with the 181-minute “Avengers: Endgame” (currently the second highest grossing movie of all time).
Last year, the runtime panic button got smashed when two of our greatest living filmmakers, Christopher Nolan and Martin Scorsese, breached the three-hour threshold with their masterpieces “Oppenheimer” and “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Are studios perhaps overindulging these artists? Did these movies really have to be that long?
Villenueve heard this criticism when “Dune: Part Two” clocked in at a reasonable 166 minutes, and he quickly brushed it off. As he told The Times:
“This was the only way I could succeed. Also, think of ‘Oppenheimer.’ It is a three-hour, rated-R movie about nuclear physics that is mostly talking. But the public was young –- that was the movie of the year by far for my kids.”
Wait, young people, the prized moviegoing demographic of every studio in Hollywood, aren’t buying this movies-are-too-long horse pucky?