“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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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.
| Title | Final Rating | votes submitted |
| Spider-Man: No Way Home | 92.3 | 3147 |
| Avengers: Infinity War | 88.7 | 1919 |
| Respect | 86.0 | 113 |
| Mission: Impossible – Fallout | 86.0 | 1057 |
| In the Heights | 85.7 | 225 |
| King Richard | 84.4 | 89 |
| Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker | 81.3 | 3140 |
| Bad Times at the El Royale | 78.9 | 235 |
| First Man | 78.9 | 341 |
| Motherless Brooklyn | 78.9 | 80 |
| Ready Player One | 78.8 | 72 |
| Aquaman | 78.6 | 1207 |
| Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore | 78.4 | 629 |
| Jurassic World Dominion | 74.8 | 514 |
| F9 | 74.8 | 475 |
| Midsommar | 73.6 | 272 |
| Stillwater | 73.3 | 116 |
| The Matrix Resurrections | 73.2 | 450 |
| The Goldfinch | 72.9 | 67 |
Likewise, the 160-169 runtime block of movies perform really well. Here are all three movies in this runtime block.
| Title | Final Rating | votes submitted |
| No Time to Die | 83.6 | 1390 |
| Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood | 81.1 | 1218 |
| It Chapter Two | 77.9 | 736 |
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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Creator and developer of the RunPee app. When something doesn’t work right in the app it’s pretty much his fault. 🙂
Aspiring author. Would like to finish his “Zombie Revelations” trilogy if he could break away for working on RunPee and the cottage he’s building for RunPee Mom.
Michael Fields
For me, personally I like a long run time as it makes me feel as if I am getting my money’s worth. Well at least if its a good movie, I mean there have been some movies that really drag (Love Star Trek, but the first movie was so boring it put me to sleep) or if all they do it talk, then it drags, if they put in action, and then talk, action, talk and so on that will move the story forward then the longer a movie the more I want to see more and am sad when it ended, (even if it was 2 1/2 hours long)
Terri
That’s a lot of bars! Sign me up! Haha
Excellent data, Dan! Thanks for researching!
As much as I’m turned off when I see a movie has a run time in the realm of 2-1/2 hours, I must admit there are always exceptions. I’ll take most Marvel movies for well over 2 hours. In fact, I seldom look to see how long those movies are because I know I’m going to be entertained (usually)! Perhaps I think a lot of movies are longer than necessary because there are so many fights, explosions, falling buildings, etc. It gets repetitive and does nothing for me after a while. That’s when I say “longer than it needed to be” vs “all movies more than 2 hours are too long!”
Bottom line: it would be fun for your users to sit at those bars and have some good, healthy discussion about the reviews and posted on this app. Now that would be welcome to go well beyond 2-1/2 hours!
Dan Gardner Administrator
Funny you mention Star Trek. But the first movie? Is that the 2009 ST or the original ST The Motion Picture? I definitely agree if it’s the latter. Wow, they went on a bender with some of those scenes.
We just rewatched all three of the new ST “Kelvin Timeline.” I thought ST 2009 was really good. Definitely has some huge plot holes but name anything that JJ Abrams is involved with, besides Super 8, and there are plot holes large enough to drive a space dock through. 🙂
Anyway, I agree with the “getting my money’s worth” comment. There are exceptions, but I feel that it usually takes at least two hours to properly tell a good story.
Dan Gardner Administrator
That would be awesome to have a RunPee movie meetup. If only we were all in the same city! 🙂
Elizabeth
I’m just glad I have your app!
I think part of my problem is that there are usually 20-30 minutes of previews & commercials before the movie – so the over 2 hour movies end up being almost 3 hours by the time all the other nonsense is added in.
Dan Gardner Administrator
I know. The trailers/commercials at AMC usually run 25 minutes now. I can’t wait for AMC to get rid of that stupid intro for their theaters. We’re already in the movie theater. They’re just wasting our time at this point.
We actually changed our Peetime habits due to this. We try very hard to find a Peetime prior to the 30 minute mark, which would be about an hour for someone who went to the rest room right before the movie. Some people can’t make it to the 45 minute mark.