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It's become fairly common practice these days for big movies to have big run times. Avengers: Endgame was more than three hours long, and Marvel movies regularly run over two hours. For Zack Snyder to complete his version of Justice League he needed more than four hours. So, if one was making a movie where two of the most popular monsters of all time went head-to-head, you might expect that movie to be quite long. Instead, Godzilla Vs. Kong is slightly less than two hours long, but director Adam Wingard doesn't have a problem with that.
Both the previous Godzilla films in this franchise, 2014's Godzilla and Godzilla: King of the Monsters clock in at over two hours. Kong: Skull Island is two minutes short of the two hour mark. This makes Godzilla vs. Kong, which clocks in at a reported one hour and 53 minutes, the shortest movie in the franchise so far. But don't expect Adam Wingard to get his own "Snyder Cut" as he tells Variety that the movie is exactly as long as he wants it to be, and fans hoping for more likely wouldn't get what they were looking for if it was any longer. According to Wingard...
A lot of the fans online were all asking me is this going to be a three-hour film? When it was announced that it was a little under two hours they immediately thought — when is the director’s cut coming out? I like movies under two hours. I think if you do a movie over two hours, you better have a damn good reason for it to be that long. At the end of the day, if you’re going to make this movie into three hours, you’re not going to get an extra hour of monsters fighting. You’re going to get an extra hour of people talking about monsters.
So if you were hoping for a three hour long movie, you aren't going to get it when Godzilla vs. Kong opens next week, or possibly ever, as the sub-two hour version is exactly the movie director Adam Wingard was trying to make. It sounds like he's generally not a an of longer movies and feels that in many cases films over two hours probably didn't need to be that long.
And if we're all honest, if a longer movie is only going to give us more scenes of people talking about monsters, which would certainly be the case, then none of us really need a longer movie, right? We're all here to see the monsters fighting, and as long as we get a lot of that in our two hour flick, it's all good.
And that's actually where the two hour movie works better. The same amount of action in a three hour film is just going to have to spread that action over a longer period, but here, it will all be more compact, and likely make everything move at a much faster pace, making the movie seem even shorter than it is.
