Why UK cinema boss has called for shorter movies to be made

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Clare Binns, who leads creative direction at Picturehouse Cinemas, is advocating for filmmakers to create shorter films, according to a report in The Guardian.

Historian David Binns, receiving a lifetime achievement award from BAFTA this year, shared his advice for filmmakers: ‘Remind directors they should be making movies for viewers, not just for themselves.’

While there are always exceptions, I often watch movies and feel they could be significantly shorter. Many films just don’t need to be as long as they are.

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That means you’ll only have one showing each night,” Binns explained. “I think this should be a reminder to filmmakers: if they want people to see their movies in theaters, those movies need to be worth the audience’s time and money.

Recently, there’s been a lot of discussion about whether movies are getting too long, with many directors and industry experts weighing in. The success of Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film, One Battle After Another (2025), which received 13 Oscar nominations despite its 162-minute runtime, suggests that audiences are still open to longer films.

Director Brady Corbet, whose three-hour-and-thirty-five-minute historical drama, The Brutalist (2024), earned three Academy Awards last year, recently dismissed concerns about movie length. He told Variety that his film deliberately breaks common filmmaking rules, stating, “This film does everything that we are told we are not allowed to do.”

It seems a bit pointless to discuss how long something takes to watch, because it’s like complaining a book is too long just because it has a lot of pages. I should be free to make things that are any length I choose – maybe my next project will be 45 minutes long. We all should be! It’s ridiculous to think we need to stick to a specific length or format.

I saw that Martin Scorsese, the director of the recent Killers of the Flower Moon – which got a ton of Oscar noms, by the way – also chimed in on this whole thing. He was talking to the Hindustan Times and basically said, ‘People complain about a three-hour movie, but honestly, we all binge-watch shows for way longer than that!’ He’s got a point, right? If I can lose myself in a game for hours, I can definitely handle a good movie.

Many people dedicate a significant amount of time – three and a half hours – to watching live theatre. It requires a different kind of respect than going to the movies; you’re watching real actors perform, and it’s expected you’ll stay seated and fully engage with the performance. Let’s extend that same respect to cinema as well.

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2026-01-25 20:19