Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 2887085" data-attributes="member: 812">As you point out, event pictures have always been long, starting right with Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (187 min). And event pictures have steadily become more and more significant in terms of revenue over the history of cinema. And of course we no longer have serials in the theatres -- those have moved to TV, and how do you determine the length there? I mean, how long is "Days of our Lives" -- that show's been going on for DECADES. On the one hand, it's an hour long. On the other, it's forty years long.But if you want to narrow the scope of your argument to movies, and suggest that longer movies are becoming more and more significant in terms of revenue, I'll take that. Looks like there's data to back it up.It was your broader assertion that "I think delayed gratification is actually the way all entertainment is going," that I was objecting to. There have always been extremely long forms of entertainment and short forms. What is more popular in a particular field depends as much (probably more) on the economics of delivery and consumption than on audience tastes. Right now, big event pictures (which are always longer) dominate box office revenues. I don't know if that was the case in 1955 (the data doesn't tell us), but it's clearly become more and more the case.But of course box office revenues are only part of the story, and I wonder what trends we're seeing in DVD sales -- not to mention what the proliferation of channels and so on is doing to television.I just watched all ten episodes of "Les Vampires", Feuillade's popular crime serial from 1915, and with each episode at 45 minutes, that's 450 minutes of cinematic entertainment. And that format was very common and very popular in those days -- we don't see it at all anymore. The delivery mechanism for films has made this whole format unworkable. But that doesn't mean people don't want to watch long-form cinema anymore.It's funny -- usually the argument is "Kids these days, they have no attention span, everything's getting faster and quicker and it's bad bad bad." It's interesting to see someone argue the opposite.Thanks for the facts. Facts are good.</blockquote>

Verification