You know the feeling: You’re sitting in a movie theater. The film feels like it should be ending soon. Yet it just … keeps … going.
It’s not your imagination. Major wide-release films are getting longer — even if the average film produced is not.
Researcher Stephen Follows checked the run times of 36,000 films that were released theatrically from 1980 to 2025 and discovered the average length of a wide-release theatrical title has grown from roughly 106 minutes in the 1990s and early 2000s to 114 minutes in recent years. Films with big budgets — $100 million plus — tend to be even longer. He points out that pre-show advertising and trailers have also expanded to average around 20 to 30 minutes. So you’re spending more time sitting in a theater seat than ever before.
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