When was the last time you sat in a movie theater for just 90 minutes?
For many people, the answer has already been forgotten.
At some point, moviegoers began to notice that 90-minute films were becoming increasingly rare, with 120 minutes being just the starting point and 140 minutes being the standard for a "blockbuster".
Data from the National Film Bureau shows that China's total box office revenue reached 51.832 billion yuan in 2025, with 12.38 billion viewers and a total of over 93,000 screens.
Behind these impressive numbers, the average length of new films released during the Spring Festival period has quietly reached 137.3 minutes.
This is not the whim of a certain director, but a conspiracy that occurs between the film side, the cinema and the audience.
Spring Festival Box Office Turns into a 'Length Competition'
The six new films released during the 2025 Spring Festival averaged 137.3 minutes in length.
This figure, if translated into real-life scenarios, would have an even greater impact.
At 137.3 minutes, it is equivalent to having an extra half of a movie, based on the traditional 90-100 minute length of commercial films.
In past years, the time it took to watch three movies now only fits two.
If a family of three watches two popular movies on Chinese New Year's Day, from going out in the morning to returning home in the evening, it will almost take up an entire day.
More striking is the collective surge of top films.
The film "The Legend of Hero" runs for 146 minutes, while "Operation Dragon" also has a runtime of 146 minutes.
"Legend of Deification: Part II" is 144 minutes long, while "Ne Zha" is also 144 minutes long.
Detective Chinatown 3 also exceeded two hours.
Four films collectively broke the 140-minute mark, which was an exception in previous years but has become the norm in 2025.
This is not a coincidence within a year.
The average length of the 2023 Spring Festival films was 130 minutes, earning it the title of "the longest Spring Festival season ever".
will continue to be maintained at 129.5 minutes in 2024.
In 2025, it will simply add nearly eight more minutes, pushing the record even further.
Over the past three years, the average length of Spring Festival films has been steadily increasing, like climbing a staircase, with each step testing the physical limits of the audience.
This change is driven by a shift in the logic of scheduling.
The Spring Festival box office is the most important source of ticket sales for Chinese films throughout the year, with the 2025 Spring Festival box office ultimately contributing over 20 billion yuan, accounting for nearly 40% of the year's total.
In this highly competitive season, every minute represents a fight for screenings, ticket prices, and topics.
Once film length becomes an explicit competitive dimension, no one is willing to back down - if you shoot a 130-minute film, I'll shoot a 140-minute one; if you shoot a 140-minute film, I'll dare to shoot a 150-minute one.
From a historical perspective, there is another incentive for this arms race: after 2019, the Chinese film market experienced several years of fluctuations, with filmmakers' aversion to risk reaching a peak.
If one doesn't dare to innovate in terms of subject matter and genre, then they can only pile up resources on existing tracks.
And the most intuitive manifestation of "piling up material" is to drag out the length of the video.
Mythological films have more gods than others, war films have bigger scenes than others, sequels have more sentimental value than others, but ultimately all are converted into time digits.
In fact, the audience can also sense this change.
Discussions on social media about "Chinese New Year movies being too long" almost always go viral every year.
Some people joked: "In the past, watching movies during the Lunar New Year was a way to relax, but now it's an endurance training exercise."
Behind the ridicule lies the audience's genuine fatigue with the disorderly expansion of film lengths.
Thus, the Spring Festival box office has evolved from a "box office war" into an "arms race of film length".
On the surface, audiences are buying a ticket to watch a movie, but in reality, they are paying for the new rules of the game for the entire industry.
Looking back at the Spring Festival box office seasons of the early 2010s, film runtimes were far more evenly distributed.
Comedies are typically around 100 minutes long, action films are between 110 to 120 minutes, and animated films are approximately 90 minutes.
At that time, the focus of competition was on the star-studded lineup, the density of comedic elements, and action scenes, rather than who could fill a three-hour show.
In just over a decade, the dimensions of competition in the industry have undergone a fundamental shift.
This shift is also supported by data.
Historical data from Dengta Professional Edition shows that around 2015, the average runtime of films during the Spring Festival box office season hovered around 110 minutes.
It started to rise noticeably after 2018 and broke through 130 minutes for the first time in 2023.
Shot up directly to 137 minutes in 2025.
It has increased by nearly 30 minutes over the past decade, with an average annual increase of almost 3 minutes.
This would be a fairly significant case of "product specification inflation" in any consumer goods industry.
If the change in film length is plotted as a curve, it is found to be highly consistent with the trend of rising market concentration.
Years with longer film lengths tend to be the years when blockbuster movies account for a higher proportion of box office revenue.
This is not a coincidence, but rather two sides of the same market logic.
Why Creators Are Increasingly Reluctant to Edit
The primary driver of the expansion in episode length comes from the creative end.
Firstly, the subject matter has become increasingly "grand" in scale.
Myths, wars, martial arts, and epics naturally require the establishment of a worldview, the accumulation of character relationships, and the depiction of action scenes.
The second part of "The Investiture of the Gods" tells the story of the war between gods and demons, often involving the complicated relationships and grudges of dozens of gods and monsters.
Each faction has its own backstory.
The Legend of the Condor Heroes: The Great Hero aims to convey the theme that "a true hero serves the country and its people."
It is necessary to complete the transition from interpersonal grievances to a national battlefield.
"Nezha: Devils Become Idols" is set to continue the story of its predecessor and complete a new growth arc, with three interwoven plot threads exploring familial bonds, friendships, and destiny.
None of them dare to be cut lightly.
Any director would feel that editing is a betrayal of their own ambitions.
Secondly, the rise in special effects investments has also had a ripple effect.
Having spent the money and produced thousands of visual effects shots, studios and filmmakers naturally want audiences to linger in theaters a little longer, savoring each of these showpiece sequences one by one.
If it's too short, it's feared that it won't be worth the investment; if it's long, at least it seems "worth it".
This mindset is particularly evident in big-budget animated films, where every second of special effects is money well spent, and cutting even one second is painful.
Third is the risk-averse mentality in the global film industry.
Under the impact of streaming, low- and mid-budget films are becoming increasingly reluctant to enter theaters, with resources concentrating on top IP and sequels.
If a company is betting everything on one or two big films, it must take them to the extreme - and duration is one of the most perceivable metrics of this extremity.
A 120-minute film and a 150-minute film, the latter naturally seems more like a "big production" and is more likely to be touted as an "epic" in promotions.
The pressure to produce sequels is particularly pronounced.
Sequels need to cater to the nostalgia of old fans while also attracting new audiences, often resulting in a doubling of information.
The producers of "Tang Detective 1900" plan to expand on the previous work by introducing a new era background, while "The Investiture of the Gods 2" will pick up on the clues laid out in the first installment, all of which will be translated into shots, scenes, and minutes.
But this also hides a laziness in creation.
Complex narratives, character development, and world-building indeed require a certain amount of content; however, when content becomes a fig leaf, narrative efficiency is sacrificed.
Many feature films have common problems, including excessive setup in the first 30 minutes, a slow pace in the middle section, and an overload of information in the final segment.
What audiences pay for is not the director's self-indulgence, but the effective conveyance of rhythm, tension, and emotion.
A comparable example is "Re Shuai Ru Huo".
The 2024 Spring Festival box office champion runs 129 minutes — not exactly short, but the pacing is tight, the jokes land frequently, and the emotional shifts are clearly delineated.
It proves a point: being long is not a sin, being arrhythmic is.
Another cautionary tale is the numerous films that drag on for over 140 minutes, where the audience's first reaction upon leaving the cinema is not "wow" but "it's finally over".
There's a saying in the editing industry: "A movie is made in the editing room, not on set."
However, in today's Chinese film market, those who dare to make drastic cuts are becoming increasingly scarce.
Because every cut made could lead to investors asking, "I spent tens of millions on special effects, why are you only giving it 30 seconds?"
The deeper dilemma is that many creators mistake length for depth.
They think that having many scenes, characters, and plot threads is equivalent to having a grand vision, but they forget that what the audience really needs is an emotional resonance and narrative progression.
A truly profound film can strike the heart in just 90 minutes.
A hollow film, even three hours is just spinning its wheels.
Is 'More for the Same Price' a Genuine Bargain or an Illusion?
Another piece of news from the 2025 Spring Festival box office is that ticket prices did not see a significant increase.
CNR.cn and several other media outlets used a phrase in their reports - "increasing quantity without increasing price".
It sounds like a way to take advantage of a situation, but the account can't be calculated that way.
The price of movie tickets hasn't increased, but the time cost for audiences has.
A 137-minute film, plus entry, advertisements, credits, and exit, actually takes up nearly three hours.
For contemporary audiences accustomed to short-video pacing, three hours represents an extremely high decision threshold.
Audiences not only have to pay for tickets, but also plan ahead for their bladders, lower backs, and phone batteries.
Complaints about "my legs going numb from watching movies" and "missing key plot points when going to the bathroom halfway through" flood social media every year during the Spring Festival box office season.
More hidden costs are on the cinema end.
The number of shows a screen can schedule in a day is directly determined by the length of the film.
Taking a standard cinema screening room as an example, if it operates for 12 hours, a 100-minute film can theoretically be screened around 7 times; switching to a 146-minute film, it can be screened at most 5 times.
With fewer showtimes, cinemas' turnover rates have decreased, and the pressure on single-hall output has increased.
A cinema manager has done the math: for the same theater, if it shows only long films, it may have to cut back on several dozen showings during the seven-day Chinese New Year period, resulting in significant losses.
This pressure will be passed on to the scheduling managers.
During peak seasons, with limited theater slots available during prime time, managers naturally prefer to reserve showtimes for films with strong presales and high buzz.
The film itself is being squeezed out of screening schedules, and once box office expectations are not strong enough, low- to medium-budget films have almost no room to survive.
Data from the National Film Administration shows that 51 films surpassed 100 million yuan at the box office in 2025, down 28 from the 79 films that achieved the milestone in 2024.
The strongest players are consolidating their grip while the middle tier fades—the structural price of the feature-film era.
There is another layer of cost that is often overlooked: the threshold for the viewing experience.
Movies longer than 140 minutes are unfriendly to elderly viewers, children, and audiences with lower-back discomfort.
An audience member who took their parents to see a Spring Festival film release commented, "My parents wanted to leave halfway through, but since we'd already bought the tickets, we had to tough it out."
When a movie becomes a "test of endurance", it is actually quietly filtering its audience.
From the perspective of consumer psychology, "increasing quantity without increasing price" is a subtle pricing strategy.
It gives consumers the illusion of getting a bargain, thereby dulling their perception of the actual cost.
However, what the audience pays with is not currency, but rather the scarcer resources of time, attention, and comfort.
Sitting in a movie theater for three hours means missing out on three episodes of a TV show, a workout, a family dinner, or simply a period of time without back and waist pain.
So "more for the same price" is essentially a transfer payment: the audience pays for the extra 47 minutes with their bladders and lumbar discs.
Theaters paid for screening flexibility with reduced showtime efficiency.
Small and medium-sized films have paid the price for the expansion of big-budget blockbusters.
The only truly stable and profitable model is having a firm grasp on IP and traffic.
This type of subsidy also has a hidden consequence: it turns films into "time-risk investments" from "one-off entertainment consumption".
Audiences will repeatedly weigh the decision before buying tickets: is this movie worth spending three hours on?
Once expectations are not met, the feeling of disappointment is amplified, and the willingness to go to the cinema again is reduced.
If this continues, it will be the foundation of the entire film market that suffers.
Let's look at a set of simple arithmetic.
Assuming an audience member watches 3 movies during the Spring Festival, if each film is 90 minutes long, the total viewing time is approximately 5 hours; if each film is 140 minutes long, the total viewing time is approximately 8 hours.
The extra three hours are enough to watch an entire movie from start to finish.
In the era of long films, the audience's "viewing bandwidth" is being diluted, with the number of films that can be experienced during the same holiday period decreasing, and the overall market activity may not necessarily be boosted.
Short-Form Videos Are Reshaping China's Film Market Structure
Changes in video length are not an isolated phenomenon, but are instead reshaping the entire industry's profit distribution.
In 2025, the total number of movie screens nationwide reached 93,000, an increase of roughly 2,000 from 91,000 in 2024.
More screens are being built, but the number of screenings that can operate efficiently has not increased proportionally.
The reason is simple: individual films have become longer, and the total screening time per day for the same number of screens has been diluted.
It's like a restaurant where the number of seats remains the same, but the time each group of customers spends dining increases, inevitably leading to a decrease in table turnover rate.
The decline in turnover rate has the greatest impact on companies with high employee churn rates, such as those in the retail and hospitality industries, including Alibaba's Ele.me and JD.com's Dada Group, as well as food delivery platform Meituan.
Not blockbusters, but rather mid-to-low budget films.
Big-budget films, thanks to their IP, marketing, and scheduling power, can still secure prime time slots, while low- to mid-budget films are forced to retreat to off-peak hours or even postpone their releases.
The number of films with box office earnings over 100 million yuan plummeted in 2025, largely as a result of this squeeze.
A more specific example is "The Wandering Earth 2".
This 173-minute sci-fi blockbuster ultimately grossed 4.043 billion yuan at the box office, with excellent results, but discussions about whether it would have achieved even higher box office numbers if it were shorter and had more showtimes have never stopped.
A 173-minute runtime means that the same theater can schedule one to two fewer showings per day compared to a 120-minute film.
During the competitive Spring Festival season, one or two showings can make a difference of tens of millions of yuan, or even over 100 million yuan.
The impact of film length on scheduling can also be understood from another perspective.
In 2024, the number of people who went to the cinema in cities nationwide was 1.01 billion, and in 2025 it was 1.238 billion, representing a 22.57% increase in the number of viewers, but the number of screenings did not increase year-over-year.
Because the "time cost" behind each ticket has increased.
Movie theaters want to sell more tickets, but physically can't offer as many showtimes after films get longer.
More worthy of vigilance is the feedback loop at the creative end.
When the market proves that "long films + big IPs" are a safe choice, investors will be even less willing to support small- and medium-cost innovative projects.
When screenwriters write scripts, they tend to write towards the "grand", directors shoot more scenes, and producers push the editing direction towards a longer version.
As time goes on, the entire industry's creative ecosystem will become increasingly homogeneous.
The length of films is pushing the Chinese movie market towards a situation of being "long but not short".
Without sufficient scale and IP, you don't even qualify to enter the feature-length film game.
This is not diversification, but rather oligarchization.
The future Chinese film market may increasingly become a game in which only giants can participate.
This oligopoly also has another side effect: a lack of diversity in types.
As all resources flock to mythological, war, and action genres suitable for long films, the survival space for short- and medium-length genres such as romance, comedy, and mystery films is further compressed.
Audiences walking into cinemas are finding fewer genre options, reduced to choosing whether to watch a film at all, rather than which type of film to watch.
From the perspective of return on investment, feature films are also changing the industry's risk tolerance.
A film over 140 minutes long typically has a production cost of hundreds of millions of yuan, with marketing expenses adding hundreds of millions more, resulting in enormous pressure to recoup costs.
This high threshold makes investors more inclined to choose IPs and genres with proven success, rather than taking risks to support original content.
As time goes on, the film market's ability to innovate will be further weakened.
Global Uncertainty Grows, but China Market Anxiety Intensifies
The trend of longer film lengths is not unique to China.
The UK's Economist once published an article stating that the average length of films shown in North American cinemas is now around 131 minutes, about 15 minutes longer than in 2000 and about 20 minutes longer than in 1990.
Oppenheimer is 180 minutes, Avatar: The Way of Water is 192 minutes, Dune: Part 2 is 166 minutes, and Avengers: Endgame is 181 minutes.
Hollywood blockbusters are also challenging the physiological limits of audiences.
The situation in the Chinese market is more complex.
Hollywood has a mature global distribution network and derivative income to support high production costs with blockbusters; Chinese films have a more single recovery channel, and box office remains a lifeline.
This means that Chinese filmmakers are more directly anxious about the "length-to-value ratio" of their films - since they can only rely on box office returns, they must create an illusion of "more value" for audiences within the limited ticket price.
Another difference lies in the audience's viewing habits.
North American audiences have long been accustomed to epic films over three hours, from Gone with the Wind to The Godfather to The Lord of the Rings, with a tradition of lengthy films.
Chinese mainstream audiences are used to watching commercial films that are 90 to 120 minutes long, so suddenly facing films over 140 minutes requires a higher adaptation cost.
Meanwhile, the attention of Chinese audiences is undergoing intense fragmentation.
The "2024 China Film Audience Change Trend Report" jointly released by the China Film Association and Lighthouse Research Institute shows that young audiences and light users have become potential box office sources, with their attention to content more fragmented.
For them, feature films are both a lure for immersive experiences and a deterrent threshold.
This contradiction became especially evident in 2025.
On one hand, creators hope to complete grand narratives with longer formats, while on the other, audiences are increasingly accustomed to consuming short and fast content.
This tension is one of the most intractable challenges in the contemporary film industry.
In comparison, the Japanese film market is more enlightening.
The average length of Japanese theatrical films has remained relatively stable, with many commercial films still being controlled within 100 to 120 minutes.
This is not because Japanese creators lack ambition, but rather because Japan has established a mature, multi-revenue stream system: Blu-ray sales, TV broadcasting rights, overseas distribution, and peripheral merchandise.
A movie doesn't have to cram all its content into the theatrical release, it can be released in layers across different channels.
What Chinese films lack is precisely this kind of calmness.
The Korean film market also provides another reference.
The length of Korean business films is often between 110 and 130 minutes, as directors have a strong desire for expression, but producers strictly calculate the box office revenue during the theatrical window period.
Because the revenue structure of the Korean film industry is relatively diversified, production companies don't have to pin all their hopes on theatrical ticket sales.
This rationality is precisely what Chinese cinema needs to learn from.
The deeper problem is that China's film industry has yet to establish a viable business model beyond feature films.
Hollywood has streaming windows, home entertainment, merchandise, and theme parks; Japanese animation has Blu-ray, merchandise, and overseas licensing.
Once Chinese films fail to meet box office expectations, the entire situation may collapse.
This single dependency forces filmmakers to desperately "add quantity" in theaters.
Good Movies Aren't Afraid of Length, Bad Ones Don't Deserve It
Ultimately, all the debates about film length boil down to one old question: whether the movie is good or not.
"Nezha" lasts 144 minutes, but audiences are more than happy to sit through it, thanks to its compact narrative, rich emotions, and stunning visuals.
The Wandering Earth 2, which runs for 173 minutes, allows fans to watch it multiple times, as the amount of information is sufficient to support its length.
The 168-minute "Chang'an San Wan Li" packs every minute with Tang Dynasty poetry and the grandeur of the High Tang era.
These films prove that length can be a plus, but only if the content lives up to it.
On the other hand, some poorly made 110-minute films can feel like an eternity.
The problems of disjointed pacing, fake emotions, and repetitive information will not disappear just because the length of the video is shortened, but will instead be magnified when the length is increased.
A common movie-watching experience is: the first 30 minutes are still bearable, the middle part starts to lose attention, and the ending just makes you want to check the time.
So the runtime itself is not the problem—the issue is whether the content sufficiently justifies it.
Unfortunately, a misguided signal is taking shape across the industry: length equals big production, and big production equals something worth watching.
Such signals mislead creators into focusing on stretching their videos longer rather than making every minute count.
When runtime becomes a marketing pitch and "epicness" serves as a fig leaf for sluggish pacing, audience trust is slowly drained.
The 51.832 billion yuan box office in 2025 represents a peak, but it cannot mask another reality: the number of films grossing over 100 million yuan is declining, and audiences are growing less patient with ordinary feature-length films.
The market is voting with its money, and it is also voting with its absence.
When only top-tier blockbusters can drive the market while mid-tier films collectively fail to gain traction, the industry's overall resilience to risk is actually weakening.
For audiences, the ideal film market isn't one where everyone makes feature-length movies, but one where every film runs exactly as long as it should.
Just like a pair of shoes, the key isn't the size, but whether they fit.
For an industry, true maturity is not about outlasting others, but knowing when to stop at the right moment.
This judgment also applies to Hollywood.
In recent years, some Hollywood blockbusters have been criticized for being overly long, with "Fast & Furious 10" clocking in at 140 minutes but only telling half the story, while the "Transformers" series has gotten progressively longer despite declining word of mouth.
These cases illustrate that the global film industry faces the same temptations and pitfalls.
The difference lies in the fact that Hollywood has more room for experimentation, whereas Chinese films have a lower tolerance for error.
On the audience's side, discussions about movie length on social media have formed a fixed phrase: "If the movie is good, three hours is still too short; if the movie is bad, 90 minutes is still too long."
This sentence reveals the truth.
The audience is not opposed to long-form content, but rather to using length as a cover for a lack of substance.
When creators truly respect narrative efficiency, duration is no longer something that needs to be justified, but rather a natural byproduct.
In fact, film history has never been lacking in feature-length masterpieces.
The Godfather runs for 175 minutes, Once Upon a Time in America for 229 minutes, and each installment of the Lord of the Rings trilogy approaches or exceeds three hours.
These films have become classics not because of their length, but because every minute serves the characters and themes.
What today's Chinese cinema needs to learn is not how to make films longer, but how to ensure every minute earns its place.
The lengthening of films is essentially an externalization of anxiety within the industry.
With ticket prices unable to rise, streaming services unable to be overtaken, and audiences becoming increasingly discerning, filmmakers have no choice but to use film length as a new competitive dimension.
Audiences think they're getting a good deal with "more for the same price," but in reality, they're paying a hidden cost with their time and physical health.
A truly great film doesn't need to prove itself with its length; a truly confident industry wouldn't use bladder endurance as a threshold for watching movies.
The first principle of films is to be good, not to be long.
Only when film length returns to being a narrative tool rather than a marketing weapon, and creators relearn to respect the audience's time and physical endurance, can the audience rediscover the simplest of pleasures: walking into a cinema and thoroughly enjoying a movie.
Otherwise, the length of the film will only become an arms race with no winners.
Audiences are tired, cinemas are losing money, and small- and medium-sized films are dying, leaving only a few super blockbusters running alone on an increasingly long track.
References
The National Film Bureau: the country's total box office revenue is expected to reach 51.832 billion yuan by 2025.
China's film regulator said 2024 box office revenue exceeded 42.5 billion yuan.
According to CCTV News, with an average length of 130 minutes per film, why are Spring Festival movies getting longer and longer.
Yangcheng Evening News reported that the average length of movies released during the 2025 Spring Festival period increased by nearly 30 minutes.
Lighthouse Pro Edition: 2025 Spring Festival pre-sale box office data.
Xinhua Net reported that China's total box office revenue in 2024 was 42.502 billion yuan.
The Economist: Why movies have been stretched to such absurd lengths.
81905 Movie Network: 2024 China Film Annual Data.
Maoyan Research Institute: Insights into China's Film Market Data for 2024.
The China Film Association and Lighthouse Research Institute released the 2024 China Film Audience Change Trend Report.
China Youth Network: Are increasingly long films going to become a trend?
People's Daily: 42.502 billion yuan, China's 2024 box office revenue is released.