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Comment by orphea | Hacker News Reader

> I think that has to do with excessively long movies

Anecdotal experience but we (n=2) didn't have the urge to pull out our phones on Oppenheimer (180 minutes).

Oppenheimer is not an action flick. :)

Movies with a compelling story keep your attention, but with action, your brain can only take so much stimulation. Unless it has a really compelling story, your mind will wander.

Action movies try to keep your attention with ear-splitting volume levels instead.

Oh man. I wish more directors knew this. I remember watching one of the fast and the furious movies. It had like a 30 minute long action sequence. That is long enough for the adrenaline to wear off and now it’s all just tedious. I think i literally yawned during what should be edge of the seat action. I’m convinced what it needed was more breaks in the action, or at least more changes in tempo.

Sounds like it would be a better movie split into 2 or 3 sittings.

3 hours is probably getting towards the upper limit but it's hardly historically anomalous. Lawrence of Arabia was over 3 1/2 hours and other "epics" of that era were often in the 3+ hour range. (Though movie theaters often had intermissions which most would probably never do today.) Live theater (with an intermission) is often in that range as well although many newer plays seem to be more like straight through 90 minute length.

ADDED: I originally read sittings as parts but if you mean intermissions, I agree. That's what long movies used to do and it's pretty standard for live plays much over two hours.

Definitely with the intermissions. But I really mean that I often like to stop a long movie, think about it awhile, and then come back to it later. This is how short TV series work, for example. This is also how books work, by their nature. It's a kind of "intellectual digestion" - an intermission is good, but a night's sleep is even better.

Yeah, but no way really to do that for a theatrical release. You can have a Part 1 and a Part 2 spaced a year+ apart if the total length is 3 1/2 to 4 hours a la Dune. That's not what you're asking for though.

It's incredibly difficult to keep a viewers attention for 3 hours without them taking a single break, even if they are compelling. I was starting to get antsy in general around the 2h 30m mark.

Agreed. Went to watch Mission Impossible, i pulled out my phone once right at the beginning to put it on silent. My friend might have checked his phone three times for any texts/time maybe.

All I'd like to add to this conversation is a request to not treat all humans as "the average human" as deduced by any scientific study.

I must admit that the fifth vibration finally got me to check my phone during Oppenheimer. Bio pics are generally accepted to have long run times compared to action flicks though.

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