10 Movies People Thought Were Too Long: ‘Wicked,’ the ‘Avatar’ Sequels and More

In order to stay true to the Broadway musical, the Wicked the film adaptation was released in two parts. The first part, simply titled Wickedwas released in November 2024 and has a running time of two hours and 40 minutes. Part two, titled Wicked: For Goodreleased one year later in November 2025 and has a running time of two hours and 17 minutes. Together, that gives the full Wicked tale a running time of nearly five hours, with the first film running even longer than the Broadway musical’s two-hour-and-a-half running-time. Indeed, a number of reviews of the first film deemed it too long.

Ahead of the first movie’s release, director Jon M. Chu issued a statement about the decision to split the project into two movies. “As we prepared the production over the past year, it became increasingly clear that it would be impossible to wrestle the story of Wicked into a single film without doing some real damage to it. As we tried to cut songs or trim characters, those decisions felt like fatal compromises to the source material that has entertained us all for so many years,” Chu wrote in a statement via X.

Chu also promised to bring more depth to the characters, which he believed was only possible by turning the story into two films.

The second Avatar movie, titled Avatar: The Way of Water, was released in December 2022 and has a runtime of three hours and 12 minutes.

While the sequel was about 30 minutes longer than the first Avatar movie, director James Cameron explained to Total Film magazine that he felt The Way of Water had to be longer due to the second film’s increased focus on the “relationship” and “emotion” compared to the 2009 movie.

“The goal is to tell an extremely compelling story on an emotional basis,” Cameron explained. “I would say the emphasis in the new film is more on character, more on story, more on relationships, more on emotion. We didn’t spend as much time on relationship and emotion in the first film as we do in the second film, and it’s a longer film, because there’s more characters to serve. There’s more story to serve.”

Meanwhile, Cameron told Empire magazine in July 2022 that he didn’t care about complaints regarding the long run-time.

“I don’t want anybody whining about length when they sit and binge-watch [television] for eight hours,” he said. “I can almost write this part of the review. ‘The agonizingly long three-hour movie…’ It’s like, give me a fucking break. I’ve watched my kids sit and do five one-hour episodes in a row. Here’s the big social paradigm shift that has to happen: it’s OK to get up and go pee.”

Cameron’s third movie in the Avatar franchise, Avatar: Fire and Ash, set to hit theaters on Dec. 19, will be just as long as the second movie with a running time of three hours and 12 minutes. But the director previously proclaimed that it would be even longer than that The Way of Water and the longest film in the franchise.

“In a nutshell, we had too many great ideas packed into act one of movie 2,” Cameron said Empire magazine in March 2025. “The [film] was moving like a bullet train, and we weren’t drilling down enough on character. So I said, ‘Guys, we’ve got to split it.'”

He added, “Movie 3 will actually be a little bit longer than movie 2.”

Amanda Silver, who co-wrote the script for Fire and Ash alongside Cameron and Rick Jaffa, also told the outlet that the second and third movies had to be separate films because “the characters needed to breathe.”

“These movies are a lot more than just a propulsive plot and gorgeous spectacle,” she said. “I mean, these are real characters.”

Another movie adaptation that was so long that it had to be split into two parts was Dunewhich is based on the 1965 novel of the same name by Frank Herbert. Dune was released in October 2021 and runs for two hours and 35 minutes, while Dune: Part Two was released in March 2024 and is two hours and 46 minutes long.

Early on in the preproduction process, director Denis Villeneuve decided the book should be broken up into two films because he felt it was impossible to stay true to Herbert’s vision with just one movie. Villeneuve even considered developing and shooting both films simultaneously, although he was talked out of the decision due to the expense. “I’m so grateful they didn’t let me,” Villeneuve told The Hollywood Reporter in 2021. “I would not have had the stamina for two movies of this size back-to-back. It would have killed me.”

Meanwhile, Dune‘s editor Joe Walker defended the movie’s length while speaking to Screen Daily in 2022. “There is a faster version you can make of Dune if you wanted to cut back low-hanging fruit,” he said. “One of the biggest challenges was establishing all the factions and main characters and being able to get insight into their souls before they get thrown into the oven. So the film grew in length and, as a consequence, got better.”

The final movie in the Harry Potter series was split into two parts, with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 being released in November 2010 and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 being released in July 2011. Part 1 runs for two hours and 26 minutes, while Part 2 is slightly shorter at two hours and 10 minutes.

When it was first revealed the project would be split into two movies, producer David Heyman explained the format was the best way to share the story told in JK Rowling’s book.

“[The last book] is so rich, the story so dense, and there is so much that is resolved after discussing it with Jo [Rowling]we came to the conclusion that two parties were needed to do it justice,” he said of the decision, per Screen Rant.

Spanning three hours and 35 minutes, The Brutalist even featured a 15-minute intermission to give weary viewers a break.

Director Brady Corbet defended the film’s length during its premiere at the Venice Film Festival, saying in part, “this film does everything we are told that we are not allowed to do,” adding that he thought it was “quite silly” to characterize the film’s running time as a negative.

“It’s like criticizing a book for being 700 pages versus 100 pages,” he said. “I’ve read great novellas. I’ve read great, you know, multi-volume masterpieces. And you know, for me, it’s just about how much story there is to tell. Maybe the next thing we’ll make will be 45 minutes.”

Corbett and the Brutalist cast even suggested things for theatergoers to do during the film’s intermission.

Cinematographer Lol Crawley, who ended up winning one of The Brutalist‘s three Oscars, opened up about filming the movie while speaking to THR in December 2024, revealing that he and director Brady Corbet never had “a discussion about the run-time” of three hours and 35 minutes.

“I think filmmakers are like, ‘I didn’t know you could do that anymore: shoot on 35mm, have this thematically epic film — but also scale and length of run-time with an intermission — for less than $10 million,” Crawley said of the filming process. “It didn’t feel dissimilar to the way that I have worked with Brady in the past.”

The movie was filmed in 34 days, and Crawley revealed that the audience got to see most of what was shot in the final cut. “I’m very conscientious of time, and Brady is a very pragmatic director. He doesn’t shoot a lot of coverage, and he doesn’t give himself a lot of options,” Crawley said. “Basically, what you see in the movie is what we shot. He really knows what he wants, and some of the most pivotal scenes in the movie are shot in one shot.”

Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman received some backlash to its three-hour-and-29-minute run-time, though the cast defended the movie’s length while speaking to THR ahead of the film’s world premiere at the 2019 New York Film Festival.

Bobby Cannavale simply told viewers to “get over” their concerns about the runtime. “It’s a Martin Scorsese movie with Bob De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci — it’s an incredible film. I didn’t want it to end,” he said, adding that the movie’s length was “deliberate.”

“I think that there’s something very sad about that ending. It’s so epic in scale that it can’t be any shorter,” Cannavale said. “And there’s something about the ending of that movie and what it’s saying about mortality and how it stretches out at the end, particularly the last half-hour, that I found to be very affecting and very much felt like what death feels like. I just felt the weight of the end of that movie, and seeing those guys, so old, coming to the end of their lives, really landed with me, and I thought it needed to have that kind of length and scale. It tells a story that spans 40 years. You need the time, and Marty’s not really known for making short movies.”

Meanwhile, Ray Romano told THR that the movie “could’ve been another hour as far as I was concerned. Just go to the bathroom before it starts, and you’ll just get immersed in it. It has so much. It has what you would expect from a Marty Scorsese movie, and then more. It has this heart, this story, this conflict, this human-interest element to it that is more prevalent than any of his other movies, so there’s something there for everybody and something that will compel you and keep you there for three [hours] and 20 [minutes]and you won’t even feel it.”

As for Sebastian Maniscalco, he said he found the movie’s long runtime to be “refreshing.”

“I like a movie that extends and gives some time to breathe and has a long runway, rather than banging it out in an hour and a half or two hours,” he said. “Anything Martin Scorsese does, there’s a reason why it’s long, so I trust his judgment and I think it’s a nice movie to kind of sit and relax and have a nice discussion about afterwards.”

Another Scorsese film to run more than three hours is his 2023 drama Killers of the Flower Moonwhich is three hours and 26 minutes long.

“People say it’s three hours, but come on,” Scorsese told The Hindustan Times in October 2023 in response to concerns about the movie’s length. “You can sit in front of the TV and watch something for five hours. Also, there are many people who watch theater for 3.5 hours. There are real actors on stage, you can’t get up and walk around. You give it that respect, give cinema some respect.”

He also argued that Killers of the Flower Moon was intended to be watched on the big screen. “Are we intending to make a blockbuster? No, we’re making a movie, which should be watched on the big screen,” Scorsese told the outlet. “Other pictures I made? Maybe not. Sometimes, it’s the strength of the picture too, if it plays well on a smaller screen, that’s interesting. Killers could play on a small screen, but in order to truly immerse yourself, you should take out the time.”

The July 2023 movie about theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer has a running time of exactly three hours. While many viewers thought Oppenheimer was too long, director Christopher Nolan previously defended the length of the film after noting it was only “slightly longer than the longest” movie he’s ever made.

“I think of any character I’ve dealt with, Oppenheimer is by far the most ambiguous and paradoxical,” Nolan said Total Film magazine, seemingly implying there was a lot of information to share about the character over the course of the movie. “Which, given that I’ve made three Batman films, is saying a lot.”

Following the success of 2017’s supernatural horror film Itdirector Andy Muschietti brought the story of Pennywise the Dancing Clown back in 2019’s It Chapter Two. With a runtime of two hours and 49 minutes, the sequel is about 30 minutes longer than the first It movie.

While some fans were reluctant to sit down for a movie that long, Muschietti stood by the sequel’s length. “A movie is very different when you’re writing the script and you’re building a story compared to what the final product is,” he said while talking to the press in 2019, according to Digital Spy. “At the beginning, when you’re writing and building the beats of the story, everything that you put in there seems very essential to the story. However, when you have the movie finally edited and it’s four hours long, you realize that some of the events and some of the beats can be easily lifted but the essence of the story remains intact.”

He went on to say you “cannot deliver a four-hour movie because people will start to feel uncomfortable,” so the creative team “ended up having a movie that is two hours and 45 minutes, and the pacing is very good.”

“Nobody who’s seen the movie has had any complaints,” Muschietti added.