So King Kong opens today to a lot of fanfare… and I’m one of the guys blowing the horn. I just can’t wait to see this film. The only thing I’ve been worried about with Kong is the length. The film is coming in a 187 minutes (3 hours and 7 minutes). That’s a long film considering the original was only about and hour and a half.
You may remember that the studio didn’t want Jackson to go that long… but they eventually agreed to let Jackson do his thing. But what many people may not know is WHY the studio wanted Jackson to make it shorter. It wasn’t because they were afraid people don’t want to sit through a 3 hour film. The Lord of the Rings movies proved people will sit as long as you want them to if the movie is good. So why did the studio want the film shorter?
The answer is simple. I looked at the show times at my local theater today for Kong tonight… I was trying to decide if I should see the early show or the late show. But guess what…. there is only 1 show per screen tonight.
Think about it… King Kong is 3 hours and seven minutes long. Add on top of that the 20 – 25 minutes of trailers and ads… and all of a sudden you’ve got a 3.5 hour screen commitment. If they started a show at 6:30pm… the theater wouldn’t be empty until 10pm! Then a 15 minute turn around time and it’s far too late to start showing a 3.5 hour screen presentation.
What this means is that instead of having 2 shows per night per screen… King Kong can only have 1 showing per night per screen… and THAT will cut into box office numbers… a lot.
Don’t get me wrong… King Kong will still make HUGE dollars. But what the studio knew is that it could have made even more. We’ll see how well it pays off.
Excuse me now… I’m off to get my tickets.
My review of Kong is in my blog, if anybody is interested.
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Pablo, I am actually very thick, what are you on about? ;-)
Hey simone thats a great idea. I’ll just go and ask him….
i’m back, he said no he won’t and also something about me to please not stalk him anymore….
go figure. ;)
Well, maybe high and mighty Peter Jackson will take the hint from those of you who said it was too long, maybe instead of an extended version DVD of King Kong, he will chop it off to under 2 hours?
LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL
Saw the film last night. It’s way too long and drawn out. In the end we were willing the planes to go ahead and finally kill the ape! I could not believe Jackson even took time out for a romantic interlude on ice!
Like Pablo the length of the movie puts me off another viewing despite its many amazing moments.
Length of movie IS very much an important factor.
King Kong was good, but not great. They had clearly spent a lot of money on certain special effects(city/ship/blah blah) and they were always going to use. add the “i want this film to be an epic so i will make it really really long approach” and shazaam one movie thats to long for its own good.
I get the impression that us movie goers are getting spoon fed more and more, with little left to the imagination(no thanks to cgi) or letting us work out the bits inbetween(long drawn out story telling)
Is it going to affect the box office? who knows. i for one won’t go back because of the drawn out boring bits. But then again a lot of people liked that and will return.
John you’ve been proven worng about movies being three hours long three or four times in the above posts. Now it’s my turn. To quote Ebert “A good movie can never be too long and bad movie can never be too short.” Such is the case with King Kong. It’s three hours long and worth every minute. I would have sat through a three hour long Narnia but they made it 2hrs and 12mins (for better or worse). I would’ve sat through 3, 3 hour long HitchHikers’s Guide but they made it 1 hr and 42 mins (and took out all the punch lines and basically de-balled the movie). The last two x-men movie’s have been 2 hours and with such big cast that keeps getting bigger they better make it little longer in running time. The last harry Potter movie was 2hrs and 20-30 and it felt like an hour. Sitting through a three hour long movie is no big deal so long as it’s worth it and king king is definitely worth it.
the real problem is that all people suck and have attention spans of geese.
seriously.
i’m going home. hehehhe
I like it actually, it gives those scenes a bit more of a surreal effect.
I call that ‘strobe’ effect the wkw effect, as chinese director Wong Kar Wai more really used it a lot in Chungking Express and Ashes of Time.
I brought my dad to see this and he is a pretty good barometer of where a movie is dragging and where it is picking up. If it is a little slow he will actually start to doze off. I noticed he was doing that up to the time they made it to skull island. Then he was wide awake and by the end of the movie he was sniffling like a little baby. So that tells me that Jackson could have shaved some time off the beginning and had an ever better movie. Not to say that the character development in the beginning was a bad thing but there were some parts that slowed it down a bit. I also loath when jackson uses the strobe effect or whatever its called (similiar to the palantir scenes in LOTR).Still I really enjoyed it.
Hey there JoJo,
Just download the Audio Edition and hear what I said about it. I explain it in 10 minutes so I can’t explain it in 20 words or less.
Have a good one.
Cheers!
~John
There was an 11:45 showing tonight (after the 7:25 showing) at our local theater. I wonder if anyone was there. They wouldn’t get out til almost 3am after commercials and trailers. Crazy.
I’m soooo excited now to see this film. Critics are shitting themselves with how great it is. 93% fresh last time I checked at Rotten Tomatoes…..yeah! I’ll have a full review ready tomorrow night.
-Drewbacca
http://www.moviepatron.com
Saw it. Actually thought it would have been BETTER if Jackson had trimmed about a half hour from it.
Reviewed it on my blog (click on “Screen Rant” below this comment).
Vic
here in chattanooga, tn the movie is on 4 screens in one theater and another has it on 5 screens, it making sure nobody misses this huge movie. i’ll be there saturday to see it.
Excellent film and the three hours made it more rich and wonderful. A two hour Kong movie wouldn’t have been as fleshed out and exciting as it was.
I understand the mathematics of a 2-hour vs 3-hour screening time in terms of packing more people in but if the 2-hour movie isn’t as good less people will see it.
John, I can’t seem to get the audio edition thing to work. Can you give me a 20 words or less version of what you said? I’m curious how you counter the point that TITANIC, the 3 LORD OF THE RINGS films, and various other 3 hour plus films have all made massive amounts of money.
Hey guys,
Once again, insteand of writing 3 pages here… LOL… just listen to today’s installment of The Audio Edition where I sum up my reasoning.
Good discussion folks.
Cheers!
~John
Back to the original point, I live in the suburbs outside of St. Louis… Here’s just a sampling of tonight’s showtimes…
Arnold 14: 5:00 PM, 6:00 PM, 7:30 PM, 8:30 PM, 9:30 PM
Ronnies 20: 5:45 PM, 6:30 PM, 7:15 PM, 8:15 PM, 9:45 PM, 10:30 PM
Of course, I went at midnight…
You could have a 5 hour movie, and if a multiplex filled enough screens, they could have a showtime every 15 minutes.
saw the film yesterday. Yup, the premiere in Slovenia was on the 13th :) And all I can say is: WOW. This movie rocks. Action just keeps going. The ending makes you cry. Well, the best example if my girlfriend. For three months I’ve been hearing about a stupid ape movie, how I am taking her to the movies against her will etc. And at the end of the movie, she turned to me and said: Not a word!
She was crying :) Best movie of the year.
Ok a 90 minute film will make its money quicker. Surely though a three hour film will only really make less money if less people go and see it in the long run? So unless people are actually put off seeing it (or returning to see it again) as a result of the running time does it really make that much difference?
Or are these tiresome opening weekend figures really that important?
Hey guys…
You all raise very valid points. But instead of me just going on and on here… listen to tonights Audio Edition (December 14th’s). I’ll bring up my points there.
Cheers guys!
~John
I think the only financial temporary financial draw back for a 3hr vs 2hr movie is it’s opening weekend. Less showings available could mean less 1st weekend box office, but if the demand remains the money will be made.
It’s an extremely good movie — see http://thekeymonk.blogspot.com for my full review.
I disagree about the 2-hour vs. 3-hour issue. Each of the Lord of the Rings movies, all 3+ hours long, all exceeded $300M in domestic box office receipts and the last, and longest, earned the most. See Box Office Mojo for details. Each are among the top 10 worldwide gross receipt films ever. Titanic grossed more than 600M in the US and is one of two movies (Return of the King) to have topped $1B worldwide.
The movie would end up as an overhyped Michael Bay shooter if cut down to 2 hours and would make LESS money because the quality dropoff would be immense. Ultimately, the studio will have very little to complain about — especially after the DVD sales.
Can you really state as fact that the movie would have made more as a ~2 hour movie? At 2 hours, it’s a different movie than it was at 3 hours so it’s an apples and oranges comparison. The opening would likely be bigger, but would it hold up as well over the long haul (i.e. repeat viewings, word of mouth, etc.)?
Actually, John, I believe you’re the one missing the point. Regardless of how long a movie is, if people want to see it, they will, whether it’s in the first week of release or the tenth. Are you honestly saying that you think TITANIC could have made even more money than it did if it was 2 hours as opposed to 3? TITANIC played for months because there was a demand for it. The same will apply here. The studios aren’t “losing” any money because of the running time.
This is all very interesting because we often don’t see things like “studio pressure” when the filmmakers do interviews or talk to us in featurettes or production diaries. I think this will come out more (the production diaries for the new Rocky moive would seem like the prefect place to expose this – but it won’t happen). I certainly think if the studio had thier druthers they’d have split King Kong movie (al la Kill Bill) into two and reap the benifits of two actual box office opening weekends.
The trend does seems to be pushing towards shorter movies (for whatever reason), though I do see that there are exceptions to the rule with indie types of films and certain blockbusters. I do remember going to see Hamlet in a theatre in ’96 (very unheard of, even at the time) – that movie was more than four hours long!
Thanks,
Kevin
I saw King Kong last night and the movie is simply awesome! It’s a million times better than Harry Potter 4 and The Chronicles of Narnia combined! This is one 3hr movie I wouldn’t mind seeing again.
And on a side note, living in Malaysia now, I actually watched it at the movies at a 12.40am screening! Yes, that’s right..AM! Which means I got out the cinema at 4 in the morning. The movie watching experience here is a lot different than when I was in the States.
But I disgress. Back to the topic at hand – King Kong rocks! Go check it out peeps!
Hey there dRob
Yes, they show it on multiple screens. However, my theater was going to show it on 2 screens anyway. So, it WOULD have had 4 viewings per night… now it will have 2.
Cheers!
A number of multiplexes are playing King Kong on 2 or more screens, so having a choice for an evening showing in my area isn’t a problem. I even saw a showing at an AMC movie theater that didn’t start till 11:15pm! That’s a pretty late night for theater goers and workers.
Don’t multiplexes just show it on as many screens as they want? So that King Kong will actually get the number of screenings it needs, while eating into smaller films’ screen time.
Hey JoJo…
You’re missing the point. What I said in the article was:
“King Kong will still make HUGE dollars. But what the studio know is that it could have made even more.”
It’s just simple math… if the movie could have twice the showings in the same period of time, then it would make MORE.
Kong will make massive money… no doubts. All I’m saying is that the studios know that whatever amount Kong makes… it would have made even more with the ability to have miltiple showings per screen per night.
Cheers!
~John
Yeah, a 3-hour running time really hurt TITANIC, didn’t it? What’s that? Oh, TITANIC is the highest grossing movie EVER? Never mind…Guess 3-hour running times don’t matter if people want to see a movie.