One of the potential problems that we saw with the setup for Captain America: Civil War was that, with all of the heroes that were going to be making appearances, it wasn’t clear how the movie would be able to give them all adequate screen time. Now we appear to have our answer. Just make the movie really damn long.
The official run time for Captain America: Civil War appears to have been revealed and, according to ComicBookMovie.com, it clocks in at a near Cecil B. DeMille length of two hours and 26 minutes. If accurate, this would make it the longest Marvel movie to date. While the first Avengers movie ran almost as long as Civil War will, most of the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe films have run much closer to the two hour mark, if not less.
In addition to spending time with characters that we know, like the aforementioned Captain America and Iron Man, as well as Black Widow, Ant-Man and others, we’ll also be introduced to at least two new characters to the MCU in the form of Black Panther, whose role in Captain America: Civil War appears to be substantial, and Spider-Man, whose role is being kept almost entirely under wraps, so we have really no idea how big it is. In both cases we assume we’ll be spending enough time with these new characters to give us proper introductions, ahead of their two standalone films. On top of all that, we still have the entire Civil War to get through.
However, Captain America: Civil War won’t be the longest comic book movie of the year. We already know that Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice will be running longer at two hours and 31 minutes. They have an entire comic book universe to build in one movie, as opposed to simply introducing a couple of new characters, so this length was at least understandable. It’s a good thing that there’s more than a month between these two films, as we may need that long to properly recover from the physical experience of watching the first one. We’re going to be spending a lot of time in movie theaters this year.
Generally speaking, we enjoy a good long movie, as long as it doesn’t feel like a long movie. If everything inside Captain America: Civil War is important and necessary to the overall plot, then we expect this two and a half hours will fly by almost unnoticed. What do you think of these epic movie lengths? Is bigger always better, or would a bit of editing help?
