We Could Save Movie Theaters If Studios Just Did One Simple Thing

By Robert Scucci
| Published 21 seconds ago

I’m probably dating myself here, but does anybody else remember when a three-hour movie coming out felt like a cultural event? James Cameron’s Titanic was so long, 3 hours and 14 minutes to be precise, that it was sold for home viewing on double VHS sets. It was a cultural phenomenon, costing $200 million to produce and earning over $2.2 billion at the box office. But it was also the exception, not the rule, when it came to cost and scale of storytelling.

These days, ever since the MCU became the cultural juggernaut that it is, movies have gotten longer and exponentially more expensive, which makes me wonder why studios stopped putting out 90-minute movies with budgets at or around $50 million. When you look at the box office returns for so many doomed projects, they tend to have two things in common: they’re too long, and they cost too much to make.

Don’t believe me? I brought receipts.

Make Them Cheaper And Shorter! 

While I’m not totally averse to long movies, I’ve always been a strong advocate for the 90-minute runtime. It’s a simple three-act structure that lets filmmakers tell a complete story. They’re also cheaper to make, and you can have more movies in rotation at your local theater on any given day. A three-hour movie occupying multiple screens cuts into revenue potential because we’re putting all of our eggs in one basket.

2024’s The Flash cost $220 million to make and runs 144 minutes. It earned $271.4 million at the box office. That might seem like it at least broke even and secured a small profit, but it didn’t. Factor in marketing and distribution, and it’s a box office failure.

2025’s Weapons cost $38 million to produce, with a runtime of 128 minutes. Still a little long for my taste, but it earned $270 million, almost exactly the same as The Flash, for a fraction of the cost. That’s a financial success.

Of course, there are other variables at play. Superhero fatigue had fully set in by 2024, while a strong horror flick from a rising filmmaker is usually a reliable moneymaker. But the core takeaway still stands. The longer, more expensive movie performed worse than the shorter, cheaper one.

2024’s Joker: Folie a Deux cost $200 million and runs 138 minutes. It earned $208 million, barely recouping its production budget. That’s a failure. Compare that to 2019’s Joker, which cost just $70 million, runs just over two hours, and earned over a billion dollars. The pattern is hard to ignore.

Let’s push it further. 2025’s Anaconda runs 99 minutes, cost $45 million, and brought in $135 million at the box office, earning three times its production budget. If you need more proof, just look up the financials for any movie to come out over the past decade, and tell me what you see. 

The John Wick Method Works For Scaling An IP

I’m going to lay out something I’m calling “The John Wick Method,” because it perfectly illustrates the point. I’m not against long films. I’m not against expensive films. But films that are both long and expensive need to earn their keep. Superhero movies learned this the hard way when Marvel and DC kept cranking out epics nobody asked for, forcing them to course correct, reconsider their release schedule, and how much money they’re dumping into projects that don’t necessarily guarantee a return on their investment.

The John Wick franchise, on the other hand, started small and scaled up. The first film topped out at $30 million and earned $86 million. It runs 101 minutes. The concept was proven, audiences wanted more, and the sequel followed with a $40 million budget, a 122-minute runtime, and $174 million in box office receipts. Chapter 3 runs nine minutes longer than Chapter 2, cost $75 million, and earned $327 million, and so on. People wanted John Wick to be bigger and badder, that’s exactly what they got, and the numbers prove that this is the way to properly scale towards a film like Chapter 4, which is nearly three hours long, but doesn’t feel like a total slog to get through. It’s exactly why it earned $447 million against its $100 million budget. 

You know what didn’t perform well? 2023’s Napoleon, which had a $200 million budget, barely broke even at $222 million, and comes with a 205-minute director’s cut that hit streaming because the 157-minute version apparently wasn’t punishing enough. Think about how many Anaconda and Weapons-type films we could have cycled through theaters if Ridley Scott didn’t have such a hard-on for historical epics.

This isn’t an indictment of long, expensive movies. But when 2000’s Gladiator was released, it felt like an event, not standard practice. We wanted to see what $103 million looked like on the big screen. And because it was a great movie that fully justified its 155-minute runtime, it felt like a special occasion. That’s why it earned nearly half a billion dollars. It was spectacular, and people wanted to see it again. 

We Want Movies, Not Events

When every single film is treated like an event, audiences have to be selective. The last time I went to a regular, non drive-in theater, four tickets, a large popcorn, and a large soda cost me $100. If it’s also going to cost me three hours of my time for a movie that isn’t even good enough to recoup its budget, then why aren’t studios cranking out shorter, cheaper films?

We’ve reached the point where it’s obvious you don’t need hundreds of millions of dollars to make something worth watching. And nobody wants to burn an entire afternoon or evening on something that’s just “meh.” It will deter them from making a night at the movies a regular family outing, especially when you consider how much it costs to go to the movies these days.

The John Wick franchise did it right. It proved demand with a tight runtime, and a relatively inexpensive concept, then scaled up once it was proven that audiences were invested. Unless studios can consistently capture lightning in a bottle like that, it’s time to cut runtimes, cut budgets, and make movies people actually want to sit through instead of self-indulgent endurance tests. Do that, and you’ll see more asses in seats. Suddenly, 10 screens can show 10 different movies. Suddenly, people care about going to the theater again.