People Complain About Long Movies But Those Movies Get The Best Ratings

"Movies are getting so long!" That's a common refrain we hear frequently, even though it's not really true. That got me to thinking, how do people rate movies based on movie runtime? Thanks to the Peeple's Poll we have the data, so I dug into it and created the infographic below.

What all those bars represent

The chart displays a lot of information, so here's a description of what you're looking at. The colored bars represent the runtime of movies, from 90-99 minutes up to 170-179 minutes. The bars are grouped together by age and gender. Take a look at the overall patterns that repeat from one group to another. Generally speaking, the green and brown bars are the longest for any given block. Those represent movies that are between 140-149 minutes (green) and 160-169 minutes (brown).

Conversely, the shortest movies, 90-99 (lite-blue) and 100-109 (orange) are consistently the lowest-rated runtimes.

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The RunPee app has a built-in Timer to use during a movie.  The Peeple's Poll asks users for their Expected rating before the movie begins and then after the movie users can input their Final rating. We share the general results with our users. We also ask for each user's age and gender so that we can give them a breakdown of how their demographic rated a movie. That way a 35-year-old woman can see how women around her age rated a movie and exclude results from other demographics that don't represent her.

So there you have it: generally speaking, the longer a movie is the higher the movie rating.

Not so fast

The assumption is that by grouping all movies with a similar runtime together and comparing their ratings we will be able to see how users rate movies by runtime. But maybe longer movies are just better. It isn't that people like long movies, but those movies tend to be well made in the first place. Case in point, Spider-Man: No Way Home and Avengers: Infinity War are among the highest-rated movies of all time in the Peeple's Poll and both of those movies fall in the 140-149 runtime block.

Here's a list of all of the movies with a runtime between 140-149 minutes with their Final rating in the Peeple's Poll along with the number of votes submitted. You can see that the top two movies exert a huge influence over the average score for this runtime group.

Likewise, the 160-169 runtime block of movies perform really well. Here are all three movies in this runtime block.

Clearly, there are very few movies that are this long. It's a little crazy to think that since 2017 there have only been three wide-relase movies with a runtime between 140-149 minutes.

Take-away

My interpretation of this data, combined with the "movies are so long these days" complaint is that most moviegoers don't like the idea of long movies, but the quality of movies generally increases with runtime. Conversely, there are a LOT of short movies in the 90-99 and 100-109 minute range that suck. (Too many to bother putting in a table here.) A lot of these are either horror movies or kid's movies—and usually not the popular kid's movies.

So, the next time you see a headline like, "Movie XYZ has a runtime of two-and-a-half-hours+" you should think to yourself, "Crap, that's a long movie, but it will probably be pretty good." And at least you'll have the RunPee app to tell you the best times to run and pee. :-)

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