Movies have been getting longer, as our attention spans are getting worse, especially given the era of constant scrolling and going onto different apps and websites.
For many of us, sitting through a three-hour movie is starting to feel challenging rather than entertaining. Several of the most popular and recent movies have been around three hours long. Like “Wicked” and “Marty Supreme,” which were around two and a half hours, “Oppenheimer” is also over three hours long.
This is significantly longer compared to the older movies, which are usually around an hour and a half long, like “Before Sunset” (2004) at an hour and 20 min long and “The Simpsons Movie” (2007) at an hour and 27 minutes.
It’s no secret that newer generations, being raised with the industrialization of technology, have trouble concentrating. The Samba recovery found that
children had an average attention span of 29.61 seconds. This is a decline of -27.41% of what is expected for a child’s age.
Most people believe that social media is the cause of our short attention span, since we are on TikTok or Instagram the majority of the time, scrolling through 15-60 second videos. This makes it harder for us to sit through a movie without winding up on our phones or to stop paying attention
According to a study done by Microsoft, people now generally lose concentration in eight seconds. This study shows how it may be hard to focus on a movie for a long period of time. Some might say our attention spans are worse than a goldfish, who have a nine-second attention span.
Sophomore Dante Mazzuco stated, “I start to lose interest in a movie in about an hour…Our attention spans are getting ruined by how much we scroll on social media, where everything is really short, and you scroll to the next video right after you lose interest.”
A possible solution to this problem could be for filmmakers to cut out needless clips, making the movie shorter, so viewers can stay engaged throughout the movie. An example of an unnecessary scene was in the movie “Anyone but you” (2023), when Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell were having an intimate moment in the kitchen and bathroom.
Deleting scenes like these can help the audience stay more engaged by reducing the screentime of a film. This way, movies can better adapt to their easily distracted audience.
Unlike movies, most theatre performances have an intermission, which gives the audience time to reset and take a break, which is helpful so viewers can recharge and not get bored.
Movies nowadays expect the watchers to sit for hours, which can be challenging for most people.
Movies are getting long with no breaks, which makes it hard for most people to sit through a whole movie without winding up on their phone or getting bored in the middle of a movie.
