Blockbuster movies seem to be getting longer and longer, and in some cases it feels completely unnecessary. Avengers: Endgame ran for three hours, but still found itself rushing through several major plot and character beats, and you can guarantee that the Russo brothers could have easily padded it out with at least another hour of footage.
The Snyder Cut of Justice League, meanwhile, is going to be the longest comic book film ever made, with some fans more than a little skeptical that the story will justify the 240+ minutes. As for Wonder Woman 1984, losing at least a handful of those 151 minutes would have been of huge benefit to Patty Jenkins’ bloated sequel.
Ghosbusters reboot director Paul Feig once trolled his detractors by threatening to release a three and a half hour cut of his divisive effort, and Sam Neill has now claimed that there’s enough footage in the can to cobble together a six-hour take of Jurassic World: Dominion. That hardly sounds like the sort of thing that audiences would be crying out for, but the veteran actor has nothing but high praise for his time working on the sixth installment in the franchise nonetheless.
“It’s going be a big film. Colin Trevorrow has that childlike sense of wonder, playfulness and inventiveness that Steven Spielberg has. We really shot a six-hour movie. We were all very gung-ho. Hopefully, there’ll be thousands of massive cinemas ready for it because it’s a big film for big audiences.”
With the exception of the incredibly brief 92-minute Jurassic Park III, all of the other four movies have been roughly the same length, running between 124 and 129 minutes. As curious as it would be to see a cut of Jurassic World: Dominion that spans three times as long with a much heavier focus on the humans in the story, it sounds as though director Colin Trevorrow is going to have to be pretty judicious in the editing room to whittle the film down to a runtime that’s palatable for theatrical audiences.