As the saying goes, a good movie can't be long enough, while a bad movie can't be short enough-- time is subjective when you're sitting in a movie theater, and if you like what you're seeing, you'll never even glance at your watch. And modern blockbusters seem to be proving that over and over again, routinely running over the two-hour mark and, if you're James Cameron, blasting right into three. The Marvel superhero movies, lean and efficient as they can seem, are no exception, and as they prepare to release their biggest film yet, The Avengers, they're adding more time on the clock as well.
Director Joss Whedon isn't revealing much about the movie just yet, of course, but in an interview with Collider he did confirm a run time of 135 minutes, which will make The Avengers the longest Marvel movie yet, beating out Captain America and the two Iron Man movies, all of which ran around 125 minutes. Think for a second about the fact that those movies are the same length-- does Iron Man 2 not feel like it was eons longer than both of them? That's what happens when you've got a good long movie vs. a muddled, mediocre one-- time is totally relative.
Knowing how long The Avengers is won't make much of a difference in your life unless you need to schedule your mom to pick you up at the theater after, but with a little less than two months to go before the movie's release, it's good to hear Whedon talking so confidently about the movie's shape-- especially when discussing what got cut out of his three-hour first version, and why he's OK with that.
“There’s a lot of me that got cut out, but I think part of the process in a situation like this is you make the movie, you make your movie, then you remove yourself out of the equation. At some point you stop looking beyond The Avengers movie at your own stuff, you don’t look at that horizon you look at this movie and you go, ‘You know what, The Avengers are more important than I am so these things that I’m obsessed with aren’t necessarily moving the story forward, and therefore they are baggage."
Whedon talks more about why there won't be a director's cut on the Blu-Ray and why avoided in-jokes-- either to the Marvel universe or his own previous TV shows-- in the film. Our own Sean O'Connell also talked to Whedon at SXSW about Cabin in the Woods, so come back later for much more Whedon!
