It’s a weird time in movie culture, where running times are suddenly of vital importance (“Transformers: The Last Knight” is too long! “The Dark Tower” is too short!), and somehow an indication of quality. The length of a movie doesn’t matter, because it’s all about the story — as long as it’s captivating and well-formed, how much time it takes to unfold is a bit irrelevant. However, people have busy lives I suppose and want to know just how much time they need to carve out if they’re headed to the cinema. Well, you might want to set aside an evening for “Avengers: Infinity War.”
The highly anticipated Marvel movie doesn’t arrive until next summer, but as one might expect, it’s shaping up to be an epic endeavor. Collider caught up with the film’s co-director Joe Russo at San Diego Comic Con, and he revealed the film might be Marvel‘s longest yet.
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“The current cut is over two and a half [hours]… Most of it’s a movie you could show, but there’s still a lot of work left to be done, I still have a couple of scenes that we haven’t finished from ‘Avengers 3‘ that I’m shooting in the next few months with my brother, and it’s certainly gonna be a film that lives in the two and a half hour, two and a half hour-plus range,” he said.
“Captain America: Civil War” is currently the longest Marvel movie to date, running 2 hours and 27 minutes. But according to Russo, a longer running time is needed for ‘Infinity War,’ simply because there is so much narrative to deal with.
“We have to, I mean it’s a culmination event. We’ve gotta take 10 years of storytelling in this Marvel narrative experiment that’s been going on since ‘Iron Man,’ and we have to take all these disparate tones, disparate themes, motivations, and we have to pull them together in a unified narrative and write the final chapters of the book,” he explained. “There’s no way you could do that with all these characters in under that running length.”
Frankly, it’s a fair argument, and ‘Civil War’ certainly didn’t feel bloated; the Russos made sure almost everything was necessary in that picture.
“Avengers: Infinity War” opens on May 4, 2018.
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