The Guide #203: Has Hollywood ​rediscover​ed the ​joy of the 90-​minute ​movie​?

In this week’s newsletter: Once notorious for testing audience endurance, ​modern blockbusters seem to be trimming the fat​, ​from superhero sagas ​t​o comedic classics

Walking out of a 6.30pm showing of The Naked Gun a couple of weeks ago I was greeted by an unfamiliar sight: daylight. Had I gone to see the film in the upper reaches of the northern hemisphere, where daylight is near-permanent in the summer months? No I was in Leicester Square – a different kind of barren wasteland than the Arctic tundra – and there was another reason for the brightness: The Naked Gun was only 1hr 25m long.

Very few modern films – aside from those of the child-friendly variety – clock in at less than 90 minutes, but even so The Naked Gun doesn’t feel a total outlier. In fact, of the last three blockbusters I’ve seen at the cinema, only one – Superman – went beyond the two hour mark, and only by 10 minutes. The other, The Fantastic Four: First Steps, was 1hr 54m, relatively svelte for a 21st-century superhero movie. Granted, earlier in this summer we had Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, clocking in at a Brobdingnagian 2hr 49m (and boy, at times did it feel it), but looking back now, that almost feels a relic from and earlier, more indulgent time.