Longer is better

Summer vacations at Metsovo

In the summer of 2016, I went with my wife, Depi, and my daughter, Helena, for summer vacation up in the mountains, to the beautiful Greek village of Metsovo.

In the afternoon I always had about 3 hours free, during which I was surfing on my favorite internet site, the International Movie DataBase (IMDB, www.imdb.com).

An idea is born

It was then that I thought how we can predict how good a movie will be from some movie technical aspects. This would be beneficial not only for movie fans but also for the movie industry itself. The latter unlike other old industries, is very bad in forecasting as well as analyzing past results, especially so given that about 50% of the movies produced make a loss [1,2].

One important technical aspect that might affect the quality of a movie is its duration. If this is true, then one expects that in general longer movies will enjoy better rates than shorter ones. I tested this hypothesis using data from IMDB.

Action movies: longer is better

I extracted the duration and the ratings (as derived from a huge number of viewers) of the movies for three of the greatest action actors of the 1980s and 1990s, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis and Sylvester Stallone. All three are my favorite actors.

Figure 1. Relationship between movie rate and movie duration of all movies (excluding TV episodes/series, un-credited participations, short videos, voice participations) for Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone appearing in the cinemas up to 2016. Data from the International Movie Data Base (IMDB, www.imdb.org). The relationship is statistically significant.

Indeed, the relationship between movie duration and IMDB rating was positive and significant (Figure 1). This suggests that changes in movie duration are associated with changes in movie rates. In other words, for the fans of action movies, longer generally is better.

But then again, how long? Probably, as Hitchcock said: ‘the length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.’

1. https://stephenfollows.com/hollywood-movies-make-a-profit/
2. Davidson (2012) http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/magazine/how-does-the-film-industry-actually-make-money.html