Runtime Trends: Are Movies Actually Getting Longer?
We queried 367,000 feature-length films from the spameri.cz database spanning six decades. The answer is yes — but not the way you think. The median movie barely budged. The real story is at the top.
Everyone has a theory about movie runtimes. Scroll any film forum and you'll find someone complaining that movies "just aren't tight anymore" while someone else argues it's all perception bias. I decided to stop guessing and start counting.
I pulled runtime data for every feature-length film (75+ minutes) in the spameri.cz database — 367,343 movies spanning from the 1970s to 2026. Here's what the numbers actually say.
The Median Barely Moved
Let's start with the headline stat. The median feature-length movie runtime, decade by decade:
| Decade | Median Runtime | Avg Runtime | Movies Analyzed | |--------|---------------|-------------|----------------| | 1970s | 94 min | 101 min | 22,389 | | 1980s | 94 min | 102 min | 29,497 | | 1990s | 94 min | 102 min | 36,260 | | 2000s | 98 min | 109 min | 68,307 | | 2010s | 100 min | 115 min | 125,737 | | 2020s | 101 min | 113 min | 85,153 |
From the 1970s to today, the median feature film grew by 7 minutes. That's it. If you picked a random movie from 1985 and a random one from 2025, you'd barely notice the difference.
But look at the average. It jumped from 102 to 115 minutes in the 2010s — a 13-minute gap that the median doesn't reflect. That gap tells you something important: the distribution is getting skewed.
The Real Story: The Top End Is Stretching
Here's where it gets interesting. Let's look at what percentage of feature-length movies cross the 2-hour and 2.5-hour marks:
| Decade | Over 2 hours | Over 2.5 hours | |--------|-------------|----------------| | 1990s | 15.6% | 5.6% | | 2000s | 24.4% | 9.7% | | 2010s | 29.5% | 13.2% | | 2020s | 29.2% | 12.5% |
In the 1990s, about 1 in 18 feature films ran over 150 minutes. By the 2010s, it was 1 in 8. The share of movies exceeding two hours nearly doubled from 15.6% to 29.5%.
The 90th percentile runtime — the point where only 10% of movies are longer — tells the same story:
- 1990s: 132 minutes
- 2000s: 148 minutes
- 2010s: 161 minutes
- 2020s: 157 minutes
That's a 29-minute jump at the top end over three decades. The longest 10% of movies got substantially longer, even as the typical movie barely changed.
The Blockbuster Effect
You can feel this in the films you actually go see. Look at the biggest releases of the last few years:
| Film | Year | Runtime | |------|------|---------| | The Irishman | 2019 | 209 min | | Avengers: Endgame | 2019 | 181 min | | Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood | 2019 | 162 min | | No Time to Die | 2021 | 163 min | | The Batman | 2022 | 177 min | | Avatar: The Way of Water | 2022 | 192 min | | Oppenheimer | 2023 | 181 min | | Killers of the Flower Moon | 2023 | 206 min | | Dune: Part Two | 2024 | 167 min | | Avatar: Fire and Ash | 2025 | 198 min |
Seven of these ten films run over 170 minutes. For comparison, the average blockbuster in the 1990s hovered around 130-140 minutes. The prestige/tentpole tier has collectively decided that three hours is acceptable — and audiences have agreed, given box office returns.
Genre Matters More Than You Think
Not all genres drift at the same rate. Here's the median runtime for feature films released since 2010, by genre:
| Genre | Median Runtime | |-------|---------------| | Music | 106 min | | Action | 103 min | | Romance | 101 min | | Drama | 99 min | | Fantasy | 97 min | | Comedy | 95 min | | Thriller | 95 min | | Sci-Fi | 93 min | | Horror | 91 min | | Documentary | 91 min |
Action films run a full 12 minutes longer than horror films at the median. That gap compounds at the top end: the 90th percentile action movie clocks in well past 150 minutes, while horror films rarely push past 120.
Horror stays lean because tension works best in compression. Action bloats because studios pack in more set pieces when budgets grow. Music documentaries run long because concerts and performances need room to breathe.
Year-by-Year: The 2019 Peak
Zooming into the year-by-year data reveals a fascinating pattern. The median feature-length runtime climbed steadily from 94 minutes in 2000 to a peak of 102 minutes in 2019 — then essentially plateaued:
- 2000: 94 min → 2005: 98 min → 2010: 100 min → 2015: 100 min → 2019: 102 min → 2022: 102 min → 2024: 101 min
2019 was the inflection point. Before the pandemic, the trajectory was clearly upward. After it, the median stabilized around 101 minutes. The streaming boom may be acting as a counterweight — platforms optimize for different viewing patterns than theaters, and the economic incentive to stretch runtime for "perceived value" applies differently when the content is included in a subscription.
The Verdict
So, are movies getting longer? The data says: sort of.
The typical movie gained about 7 minutes over five decades — barely noticeable. But the top end of the distribution stretched dramatically. Nearly 30% of feature films now exceed two hours, up from 16% in the 1990s. The 90th percentile jumped by 29 minutes.
What's really happening is bifurcation. The movie landscape is splitting into two tiers: a massive pool of 90-100 minute films that behaves roughly the same as it always has, and an expanding upper tier of 150+ minute prestige and tentpole releases that keep pushing the boundary.
The next time someone complains that movies are too long, they're not wrong — but they're probably only watching the ones that are. The average movie is right where it's always been. It's the movies that want your attention that now demand more of your time.
Data sourced from the spameri.cz database. Analysis covers 367,343 feature-length films (75+ minutes) from 1970-2026. Runtime data as indexed from TMDb, Trakt, and IMDB sources.