Directors are turning to streaming to fulfil their epic visions – and avoid ‘bum ache’
Directors are turning to streaming to fulfil their epic visions – and avoid ‘bum ache’
Ridley Scott has reluctantly trimmed Napoleon, while Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is taking flak for its long running time. But streaming services can provide a safe haven
Dear Directors: no one is avoiding your movies because they're worried about bathroom breaks.
Why did American directors forget that intermissions existed?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The veteran film-maker is about to release his epic Napoleon, starring Joaquin Phoenix as the military genius and emperor of France, which will reignite the ever-smouldering debate about lengthy running times v expansive directorial vision.
Scott, however, was a key figure in showing that the “director’s cut” – originally a contractually obliged edit that was normally discarded – could be a commercial benefit in its own right after releasing a version of his 1982 film Blade Runner a decade later.
Martin Scorsese recently released Killers of the Flower Moon, an epic treatment of the Osage Nation murders in the 1920s, with a running time of three hours and 26 minutes, with many cinemas creating an unofficial 15-minute interval for “toilet breaks” – much to the dismay of the film’s editor, Thelma Schoonmaker.
Scorsese faced similar issues with his 2019 mobster epic The Irishman, which runs three minutes longer than Killers of the Flower Moon, and found itself the butt of social media jokes suggesting it be watched like a mini-series instead of in one sitting.
Warner Bros reportedly spent $70m on the Snyder cut, a four-hour-and-two-minute film that was released on the studio’s HBO Max streaming service.
Peter Jackson’s re-edit of footage shot for the Beatles’ 1970 documentary Let It Be was originally intended as a feature film, before finally emerging as an eight-hour mini-series on Disney+ in 2021.
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I don't even need to click it. Every contemporary movie director needs to hire someone to tell them what dumb hacks they are just so they'll rein themselves in some. I haven't seen a movie in recent memory that hasnt had a good 15 minutes i could cut, as a layman, and improve.