Many of the Year’s Biggest Movies Have One Thing in Common—and It’s Something We Supposedly Hate

Movies The Revenge of the Three-Hour Movie Many of 2026’s biggest films have lengthy run times. For once, audiences aren’t running scared. By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Nadira Goffe? Nov 13, 202610:00 AM Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Alex/Adobe Stock, A24, Universal Pictures, Cannes Film Festival, and Netflix. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. When it comes to this year’s hottest movies, you sure can see everything, but it might take you a considerable chunk of time. Let’s review the numbers: The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan’s in-demand and star-studded adaptation of the foundational Greek classic, is 173 minutes long. You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder’s mind-blowing and possibly Oscar-worthy documentary about an infamous scammer, comes in at 174 minutes. Two of this fall’s buzziest indie films—Possible Love, a South Korean film about two couples who cross paths to film a documentary about the impact of a recent labor strike, and All of a Sudden, a Japanese- and French-language film about an unlikely friendship—have run times of 164 minutes and 197 minutes, respectively. La Bola Negra, a Netflix-bound maximalist queer epic that remains the front-runner for the Best International Film Academy Award, is similarly lengthy at 159 minutes. Put together, that’s an average running time of around 173 minutes—seven minutes shy of three hours—for some of the biggest and buzziest films of 2026. Far from being deterred by the prospect of long periods in the movie theater, this year audiences appear to be fully and enthusiastically seated. Call it the revenge of the three-hour movie. We seem to have moved past the days of people whining about movies getting longer (not true, by the way) and asking about the best moment to take a bathroom break during some of the year’s biggest and longest pictures. (Remember when that became a weirdly big sticking point for Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon audiences?) In years past, three-hour movies tended to fall in one of two buckets: Marvel slogs filled with bad CGI, references to TV shows you hadn’t seen, and a retconning of everything you had seen in previous films; or lengthy “auteur-directed” blockbusters that, though very much worth seeing, felt almost like you were about to clock in for a solemn duty by showing up to the cinema. Whether it was The Brutalist with its 3½-hour run time (and cannily planned intermission) or Avengers: Endgame with its three hours of CGI battles, the name of the long picture has felt sullied in a way that this year’s movies have not. What’s so different now? The answer is fairly simple: These movies, especially the megapopular The Odyssey and the FOMO-inducing You Can See Everything, are just a plain good time. None of these movies feel as long as they are because the time on screen actively builds toward something impactful. Something is always happening in The Odyssey, which is, at its heart, an adventurous epic. You Can See Everything is pure psychological spectacle, and a pivotal shift halfway through makes terrific use of the remaining hour and a half. La Bola Negra expertly weaves three stories across various time periods into one, and does so without sacrificing too much or staying in one place for too long. Though Possible Love and All of a Sudden are more quotidian in how their central relationships unfold, the time it takes to really set the groundwork for those friendships is necessary for the full impact of what happens by each film’s end; those stories work because of the time they take to show even the most mundane of conversations. These movies are all proof of what the famed film critic Roger Ebert once said: “No good movie is too long, and no bad movie is short enough.” This is not to say all movies need to be three hours long these days. (One of the most delightful films of the year, Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil, is a delicious and tight 90, and it absolutely rips.) But it’s a good thing if audiences are no longer feeling as cowed by substantial run times as they once were. The story should dictate a picture’s length, and if filmmakers get more leeway to properly tell the tale they want to tell, regardless of run time, well—then I’m prepared to declare this year’s domination of the three-hour movie an utter triumph. Movies The Odyssey You Can See Everything