Also film was expensive, directors shot a tight 90 minute movie and called it a day. Now, we have 2,3,4 hour movies that meander endlessly.
Ars gratia artis, or so says MGM.
You may be onto something here. A 2-hour 4k movie that’s already smooth and blobby encodes down to 10GB or so and doesn’t look so different from the full-fat Blu-ray. A good film transfer at 4k… it’ll start looking off when the target file’s under 30GB, if not sooner.
[edit] though, on the other hand, they can do this well enough when they encode for streaming, from a good source, no need to start with something bad, you can just add one extra step to make it bad before encoding. Though then it invites comparison of your “high quality” (but actually awful looking) 4k streams to the much-better original source.
We really need to shorten copyright terms, if only because the copyright holders are increasingly becoming companies that have never produced any content.
Gone With the Wind is 4 hours long
But Andy Hardy Gets Spring Fever (1939) was only 80 minutes.
Road show movies, with an intermission between the two acts of the film, don't have good economics. Lord of the Rings as three movies sells more ticket than one long one, and you can offer both evening and late shows.
I usually like anything Hitchcock worked on. Maybe I should have given it another 30 minutes.
Anyway, it doesn’t give me the impression that they were worried about burning film stock, even though the movie is only 1:39.
https://stephenfollows.com/are-hollywood-movies-getting-long...
https://filmandmovielists.wordpress.com/2014/09/11/are-movie...
I track all the films I watch in a spreadsheet, half of them are in 1990-2010, which the last link shows films were becoming shorter for awhile
But here are 2 films from different eras with somewhat similar themes:
1985: The Breakfast Club, 1h37m 2023: The Holdovers, 2h13m
This is nonsense. The amount of film shot is orders of magnitude longer than the finished product and many scenes are shot over and over to get a good take. A film with a longer running time doesn't necessarily need more shooting time than a shorter film.
No, many scenes are done correctly on the first take. Because film, film development, the equipment to edit film, and the staff cost real money. And you don't see if it was a good shot for weeks.
Often the next day, which is why they called them "dailies":
> The term "dailies" comes from when movies were all shot on film because usually at the end of each day, the footage was developed, synced to sound, and printed on film in a batch (and later telecined onto videotape or disk) for viewing the next day by the director, selected actors, and film crew members. After the advent of digital filmmaking, "dailies" were available instantly after the take and the review process was no longer tied to the overnight processing of film and became more asynchronous.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dailies
You had to know quite quickly because the production needed to know whether the scene was captured properly so that it could be determined whether the set could be dismantled and the crew could move on to the next scene.
And they all suck too. No wonder nobody goes to watch movies anymore.