Time is the one resource you’re never going to get any more of. So why does Hollywood feel so comfortable siphoning it out of you with movies by Peter Jackson?
It can’t be easy to be a filmmaker and realize that your movie is too long. But there’s a reason that studios hire editors with leathery hearts and cold, calculating demeanors: So we don’t get stuck with more movies like the ones listed below.
Avatar: The Way of Water
I knew that Avatar: The Way of Water was going to be long when my best friend convinced me to put it on. It’s part of why I’d waited until it was streaming to join the collective dialogue. The “Avatar: Hold Your Water” jokes were just too right there, you know?
And you wanna know what? It was swell. I was pleasantly surprised. I remember thinking “Man, why did I think this movie was going to be a chore? It’s hitting all the right notes. It’s scratching every itch you want scratched when you’re going into a blockbuster.” Then I had a question about one of the blue guys, and I hit pause to ask my buddy, and I saw that – an hour and a half in – there were two more hours to go. I screamed at my TV. Like, screamed out loud. It was like some primal impulse pushed its way out of my amygdala and bayed through my body, hoping to frighten off an invading predator. My buddy stopped coming over to watch movies after that, and I blame James Cameron more than I blame myself.
King Kong (2005)
Coming off of the success of the Lord of the Rings movies – and especially the industry-redefining demand for the Extra Interminable Special Edition DVDs – you could almost hear studio executives reacting to the three-hour cut of 2005’s King Kong. “I don’t get it,” they seemed to say, “but I didn’t get the Hobbit stuff either, and that paid for my rad new Chrysler Prowler.”
I was a teenager with alarmingly forgiving taste in movies. I just liked going to the theater. It was an alien feeling, realizing how bored I was, and even more bizarre when I stood up at the end of King Kong’s Skull Island act, thinking that the film was over, only to be disappointed to realize that there was still an entire movie’s worth of movie left to watch. And boy howdy, did it ever feel like a solid third of that movie was made up of that scene where the primate goes ice skating on his little bottom — you know, the stuff people want to see going into a movie about a giant killer ape.
The Sound of Music
The perennial favorite of hungover teachers at the Catholic school I attended from kindergarten to fifth grade due to – as far as I can tell – the fact that there were nuns in it, The Sound of Music has been burned into my brain. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: This is a three-hour movie about a woman who quits being a nun so she can hook up with a guy and rebel against the Nazis. It should have been a Quentin Tarantino movie.
Instead, this Best Picture-winner exists forever in my head as the two-VHS, never-ending tale of a lady who ruined her boss’s drapes and combined nature’s two greatest crimes: puppets and yodeling. Also, anyone caught on tape singing “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” should be shot into the sun.
Funny People
Sometimes, a director gets too big, and people stop telling them “no.” It happened to Lucas, and we got the prequel trilogy. It happened to Peter Jackson, and we got King Kong. When it happened to comedy icon Judd Apatow, the mind behind The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, we got Funny People, the 146-minute answer to the question “What if Jay Gatsby was sad about being Adam Sandler?”
Eternals
Marvel really opened themselves up to a lot of easy jokes when they tacked the name “Eternals” onto a 2-hour, 36-minute movie about mostly-indiscernible characters whose names you, with a gun to your head, could not possibly remember correctly. The fact that the heroes are functionally immortal is the only reason they made it to the end of the film.
Pearl Harbor
Part of the unfortunate post-Titanic push for long-winded historical romances set against scenic catastrophes, 2001’s Pearl Harbor remains on the DVD shelves of millions – not as a cherished favorite, but as a bleak reminder: Don’t trust Michael Bay. He’ll swallow three hours of your life.
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Trilogy
I’m not saying anything new here. We all know that The Lord of the Rings is a trilogy that lends itself to an obsessive, detailed adaptation. It is an obsessive, detailed series of books. Conversely, The Hobbit is a children’s story about riddle contests and a scary dragon. At an average pace of 250 words per minute, it would take five hours and 20 minutes to read. It would take around eight hours to watch all three movies that the studio laboriously milked out of it. Blessedly, to this day, no one has ever tried.
The Lone Ranger
Say what you will about director Gore Verbinski’s incomparable eye for vast scope and singular ability to capture the majesty of the open plains. The Lone Ranger was 149 minutes long. You can hardly blame Armie Hammer for walking away a little hungry.
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
Never has a movie cost so much — and taken so much time — to accomplish so little. Given The Rise of Skywalker’s fraught history and super rushed production, it’s a little surprising that they even had the time to shoot two hours and 22 minutes of footage.
The Irishman
The quickest way to really sink into the depression inherent in the COVID-19 lockdown was, without a doubt, to look up and realize that you had just watched all 209 minutes of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman in one sitting. The internet was right, 2020 shouldn’t count.
The Lion King (2019)
Generally speaking, you can count on an animated Disney movie for two things. Number one: It’ll have colorful, zany, loveable cartoon characters to keep your kids engaged. Number two: It’ll be short enough to keep said kids’ attention the whole time, allowing you the 88 minutes necessary to take a prime, upright, in-theater nap.
The original The Lion King? Aces. 10/10 on all fronts, no notes. Some of the happiest memories of my childhood were of sitting in a dollar theater, laughing at Timon and Pumba’s fart jokes while my mom passed out from exhaustion next to me. For whatever reason, the folks at Disney decided that my generation didn’t deserve that same luxury once we grew up, and we got the 2019 Lion King with its two-hour runtime and unsettlingly sad, realistic animals. I couldn’t get ten seconds of shut-eye without the kids shaking me awake and asking questions like “does it hurt Pumba to have teeth like that?” and “when my parents make the ransom drop, will you take me home?”