EARLIER THIS WEEK, Lucas Shaw of Bloomberg tweeted, referencing Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, that you “REALLY need to justify a 3 ½ hour movie” in a world where you can make a shorter movie or a six-hour miniseries instead.
While it’s true that very few movies for a mass audience (meaning The Godfather Part II, as opposed to Sátántangó) justify a runtime of 3.5 hours or more, it’s also true that that’s always been true. It’s a rare thing. You can practically count them on one hand. The innovation here is the rise of streaming and the explosion of hours to fill, leading to numerous series and miniseries and aborted series bobbing through the cultural stream like so much flotsam and jetsam. The question, then, is whether or not the six-hour miniseries is really and truly preferable to the epic individual film.
Read Full Article »