When was the last time you sat in a movie theater for just 90 minutes?
For many people, that answer is already hard to recall.
At some point, moviegoers began noticing that 90-minute films are becoming rarer, 120 minutes is just the starting point, and 140 minutes is considered the standard for a blockbuster.
Data from the China Film Administration show that in 2025, China's total box office reached 51.832 billion yuan, with 1.238 billion admissions and over 93,000 screens.
Behind these impressive numbers, the average runtime of new films during the Spring Festival season has quietly risen to 137.3 minutes.
This is not the whim of a particular director, but a collusion among studios, theaters, and audiences.
Spring Festival Film Season Becomes a Runtime Arms Race
The six new films in the 2025 Spring Festival season averaged 137.3 minutes in runtime.
If this number is translated into everyday scenarios, the impact becomes even more striking.
At 137.3 minutes, the film runs about half a movie longer than the traditional 90-to-100-minute commercial standard.
The time it once took to watch three films now covers only two.
A family of three watching two popular films back-to-back on the first day of the Lunar New Year can easily spend the entire day out, from morning to night.
Even more striking is the collective sprint by the top titles.
The Legend of the Condor Heroes: The Great Hero runs 146 minutes, as does Operation Leviathan.
Creation of the Gods II: Demon Force and Ne Zha 2 each run 144 minutes.
Detective Chinatown 1900 also exceeds the two-hour mark.
Four films all breaking the 140-minute mark was an exception in past years; in 2025 it became the norm.
This is not a one-year anomaly.
The 2023 Spring Festival season averaged 130 minutes per film, already the longest on record.
In 2024, the average held at 129.5 minutes.
In 2025, it climbed nearly eight minutes, extending the record.
Over three years, the average runtime has risen steadily, each step testing viewers' endurance.
The change reflects a shift in the season's underlying logic.
The Spring Festival is the most critical box-office period for Chinese films, generating over 20 billion yuan in 2025, almost 40% of the year's total.
In this high-value window, every minute counts in the fight for screenings, pricing, and buzz.
Once runtime becomes a visible competitive dimension, no one is willing to back down first — a 130-minute film prompts a 140-minute response, and 140 minutes invites 150.
Historically, this arms race has another driver: after 2019, China's film market went through several years of volatility, pushing studios' risk aversion to its peak.
Unwilling to innovate in themes or genres, studios instead pile resources into established tracks.
The most direct manifestation of this piling-on is longer runtimes.
Mythology films compete on the number of deities, war films on the scale of scenes, sequels on the depth of nostalgia — all ultimately reflected in runtime numbers.
Audiences have noticed this change.
Social media discussions about 'Spring Festival films being too long' have become an almost annual trending topic.
As one joke puts it: 'Going to the movies during the New Year used to be relaxation; now it's physical training.'
The joke reflects genuine audience fatigue over runaway film runtimes.
As a result, the Spring Festival slot has turned from a box-office battle into a running-time arms race.
When audiences buy a ticket, they appear to be paying for a film, but in effect they are footing the bill for the industry's new rules of the game.
Looking back at the Spring Festival releases of the early 2010s, the distribution of film lengths was far more balanced.
Comedies typically ran around 100 minutes, action films 110 to 120, and animated features roughly 90.
Back then, competition centered on star casts, joke density, and action sequences—not on who could fill three hours.
In just over a decade, the industry's competitive dimensions have fundamentally shifted.
This shift is also supported by data.
Historical data from Lighthouse shows that around 2015, the average runtime for Spring Festival films hovered near 110 minutes.
It began climbing noticeably after 2018, breaking past 130 minutes for the first time in 2023.
In 2025, it jumped to 137 minutes.
That's an increase of nearly 30 minutes over a decade, or about 3 minutes a year.
For any consumer product, that would count as significant 'specification creep.'
Plot runtime against time, and the curve closely matches the rise in market concentration.
Years with longer films tend to be years where top titles take a bigger share of box-office revenue.
That's not coincidence; it's two sides of the same market logic.
Why Creators Are Increasingly Reluctant to Cut
The primary driver of lengthening runtimes comes from the creative side.
First, genres are getting bigger in scope.
Mythology, war, wuxia, and epic genres naturally require expansive world-building, dense character networks, and action set pieces.
"Fengshen Part 2" depicts a war between gods and demons, involving the feuds and entanglements of dozens of deities and monsters.
Every faction's backstory must be established.
"The Legend of the Condor Heroes: The Great Hero" seeks to highlight the theme that a true hero serves the nation and its people.
It must shift from martial-arts vendettas to a national battlefield.
"Ne Zha 2" continues its predecessor and completes a new growth arc, with family, friendship, and fate storylines advancing in parallel.
None of these shots can be cut lightly.
Any director would feel that cutting is tantamount to betraying their own ambition.
Second, visual-effects budgets have risen accordingly.
According to public reports, 'Ne Zha 2' cost about 500 million yuan to produce, and both 'Fengshen Part 2' and 'Operation Dragon' are projects with investments in the hundreds of millions of yuan.
With money spent and thousands of visual-effects shots completed, studios and filmmakers naturally want audiences to linger in theaters and work through these pricey set pieces one by one.
A shorter runtime risks looking like a poor return on investment; a longer one at least seems to offer value.
This mindset is especially pronounced in animated blockbusters, where every second of effects costs real money and cutting even a second stings.
Third is the global film industry's risk aversion.
As streaming disrupts the industry, mid- and low-budget films are increasingly shunning theaters, with resources flowing to top IPs and sequels.
Studios betting on a few blockbusters must push them to the extreme — and runtime is one of the most visible measures of that ambition.
A 120-minute film and a 150-minute film side by side: the latter naturally looks more like a big production and lends itself to 'epic' marketing slogans.
The pressure on IP sequels is especially evident.
Sequel films must cater to longtime fans' nostalgia while attracting new viewers, often doubling the amount of content.
'Detective Chinatown 1900' expands the franchise into a new era, while 'Creation of the Gods II' must pay off the first film's setups — such demands translate into more shots, scenes, and minutes.
But this also masks creative laziness.
Complex narratives, ensemble characters, and world-building do require length; but once length becomes a fig leaf, narrative efficiency suffers.
A common problem in many feature films is excessive setup in the first 30 minutes, sluggish pacing in the middle, and information overload in the final act.
What audiences pay for is not the director's self-indulgence but the effective delivery of pacing, tension, and emotion.
A useful comparison is YOLO.
The 129-minute film, the box-office champion of the 2024 Spring Festival season, is not short, yet it maintains tight pacing, dense laughs, and clear emotional turns.
It proves a point: length is not the sin; lack of pacing is.
Another cautionary tale is the many films stretched past 140 minutes, where audiences leave the theater not with a sense of awe but with a sigh of 'finally over.'
An industry adage among editors: 'Films are made in the cutting room, not on the set.'
Yet in today's Chinese film market, fewer and fewer editors dare to cut aggressively.
Because every cut risks investors asking: 'I spent tens of millions on special effects — why only 30 seconds?'
The deeper problem is that many creators mistake length for depth.
They assume more scenes, characters and plotlines mean greater ambition, forgetting that audiences actually want emotional payoff and narrative momentum.
A truly profound film can hit home in just 90 minutes.
An empty film, even at three hours, just goes in circles.
More for the Same Price: Real Value or Illusion?
Another story from the 2025 Spring Festival box office: ticket prices barely rose.
China National Radio and other outlets described it as 'more content, same price.'
It sounds like a steal, but the math doesn't work that way.
Movie ticket prices haven't risen, but the time cost for audiences has.
A 137-minute film, including seating, trailers, credits and exiting, consumes nearly three hours in total.
For viewers used to short-form video, a three-hour commitment is a major hurdle.
Viewers must not only pay for the ticket but also plan around bathroom breaks, back strain and phone battery life.
Every Lunar New Year box-office season, social media fills with gripes about numb legs and missing crucial scenes during bathroom trips.
The subtler cost falls on cinemas.
A screen's daily screening count is dictated directly by runtime.
For a standard theater auditorium running 12 hours, a 100-minute film can fit about seven screenings; a 146-minute film, at most five.
With fewer screenings, theater turnover declines, increasing pressure on revenue per screen.
One theater manager calculated that if a screen ran only longer films, it could lose dozens of screenings over the seven-day Spring Festival holiday—a significant shortfall.
Such pressure falls on programming managers.
During peak seasons, prime-time screens are scarce, so managers naturally favor films with strong advance sales and buzz.
Longer films inherently reduce the number of possible screenings, leaving small- and mid-budget films with little room to survive unless box-office prospects are strong.
National Film Administration data show 51 films crossed 100 million yuan at the box office in 2025, 28 fewer than the 79 in 2024.
Blockbusters are getting stronger while mid-tier films weaken—a structural cost of the era of longer movies.
Another often-overlooked cost: the higher bar for the moviegoing experience.
Movies running over 140 minutes are unfriendly to elderly viewers, children, and anyone with back discomfort.
A viewer who brought parents to a Lunar New Year film said: 'My parents wanted to leave halfway through, but we had already bought the tickets, so we had to tough it out.'
When a film becomes an endurance test, it is quietly filtering its audience.
From a consumer-psychology perspective, 'more for the same price' is a refined pricing strategy.
It creates the illusion of a bargain, dulling consumers' perception of the true cost.
But audiences pay not in currency, but in scarcer resources: time, attention, and comfort.
Three hours in a cinema means missing three TV episodes, a workout, a family meal, or simply a period without back pain.
So 'more for the same price' is essentially a transfer payment: audiences pay for the extra 47 minutes with their bladders and lumbar discs.
Cinemas traded screening efficiency for scheduling flexibility.
Smaller films paid for the expansion of top blockbusters with their survival space.
The truly risk-free winners are big studios that control the IP and the traffic.
This transfer has a hidden consequence: it turns movies from one-off entertainment consumption into a time-risk investment.
Audiences now weigh repeatedly before buying a ticket: Is this film worth three hours?
When expectations are dashed, disappointment is magnified and the next trip to the cinema becomes less likely.
Over time, the entire film market's fundamentals are eroded.
Now for some simple arithmetic.
Assume a moviegoer sees three films during the Spring Festival holiday. At 90 minutes each, that's about five hours; at 140 minutes, about eight.
Those extra three hours are enough for an entire additional film.
Longer films stretch audience capacity, cutting how many titles can be seen in the same break without necessarily boosting overall market activity.
Film Length Reshapes Chinese Cinema's Market Structure
Film-length shifts aren't isolated—they're reworking how revenue is shared across the industry.
China's screen count hit 93,000 in 2025, up roughly 2,000 from 91,000 a year earlier.
Despite more screens, the number of high-efficiency showtimes hasn't grown in step.
Simple reason: longer films spread the same total daily screen time across fewer sessions.
Think of a restaurant with fixed seating: longer meals mean lower table turnover.
Who is most affected by declining screen turnover rates?
Not big-budget blockbusters, but small- and medium-budget films.
Blockbusters, backed by intellectual property, marketing, and leverage over screening schedules, still secure prime slots. Smaller films are forced into off-peak hours or simply postpone their release dates.
The sharp drop in the number of films grossing over 100 million yuan in 2025 is largely a result of this squeeze.
A more concrete example is 'The Wandering Earth 2.'
The 173-minute sci-fi blockbuster ultimately grossed 4.043 billion yuan, an excellent result, yet debate has never ceased over whether a shorter runtime and more screenings would have pushed it higher.
A 173-minute runtime means a single screen can fit one or two fewer screenings per day than a 120-minute film.
During a fiercely competitive window like the Spring Festival holiday, one or two screenings can mean tens of millions—or even hundreds of millions—of yuan in box-office revenue.
The effect of runtime on screening schedules can also be viewed from another angle.
Nationwide urban cinema admissions rose 22.57% to 1.238 billion in 2025 from 1.01 billion in 2024, yet screening sessions did not grow in tandem.
That's because the time cost behind each ticket has increased.
Theaters want to sell more tickets, but longer runtimes reduce the number of screenings they can physically offer.
More worrying is the feedback loop on the creative side.
Once the market shows that 'long runtime plus major IP' is a safe bet, investors grow even more unwilling to back mid- and low-budget innovative projects.
Screenwriters instinctively write bigger, directors shoot more scenes, and producers push editing toward longer runtimes.
Over time, the industry's creative ecosystem becomes increasingly homogeneous.
Rising runtimes are pushing China's movie market toward a 'too big to be short' dynamic.
Without sufficient scale and intellectual property, you don't even qualify to compete in the long-film arena.
This isn't diversification; it's oligopoly.
China's film market of the future may increasingly resemble a game that only the biggest players can join.
This oligopoly has another side effect: a narrowing of genres.
As resources flow into mythology, war and action films—genres suited to long runtimes—the room for romance, comedy and mystery, which typically run shorter, is squeezed further.
Moviegoers find fewer choices, reduced to deciding whether to see a film, not what kind of film to see.
Longer films are also reshaping the industry's risk appetite from a return-on-investment perspective.
A blockbuster over 140 minutes typically costs hundreds of millions of yuan to produce, plus additional hundreds of millions for marketing and distribution, creating enormous pressure to recoup the investment.
This high barrier makes investors more inclined to choose IPs and genres with proven track records rather than risk supporting original content.
Over time, the film market's capacity for innovation is further weakened.
Global Cycles Are Lengthening, but China's Market Is More Anxious
Longer films are not a phenomenon unique to China.
The Economist once noted that the average runtime of North American theatrical films is now about 131 minutes, roughly 15 minutes longer than in 2000 and 20 minutes longer than in 1990.
Oppenheimer (180 minutes), Avatar: The Way of Water (192 minutes), Dune: Part Two (166 minutes), Avengers: Endgame (181 minutes).
Hollywood's mega-blockbusters are likewise testing the physical limits of audiences.
But the situation in the Chinese market is more complex.
Hollywood has mature global distribution networks and ancillary revenue streams, allowing feature films to absorb high production costs. Chinese films rely on a narrower set of revenue channels, with box office still the lifeline.
That means Chinese studios feel a more direct anxiety about runtime cost-effectiveness: since box office is the only way to recoup investment, they must create the illusion of greater value within a limited ticket price.
Another difference lies in audience viewing habits.
North American audiences have long been accustomed to epics running over three hours, from Gone with the Wind to The Godfather to The Lord of the Rings. Long films have a tradition there.
Chinese mainstream audiences, by contrast, have built their viewing experience mostly on 90-to-120-minute commercial films. Suddenly facing a film over 140 minutes, the adaptation cost is higher.
At the same time, Chinese audiences' attention spans are undergoing sharp fragmentation.
A report jointly released by the China Film Association and Dengta Research, the 2024 Chinese Film Audience Trends Report, shows that young viewers and light-frequency users have become potential ticket pools, with increasingly fragmented attention to content.
For them, long films are both a lure for immersive experiences and a barrier that turns them away.
This contradiction was especially evident in 2025.
Ne Zha 2 drew large numbers of young viewers for repeat screenings by turning a feature film into an 'event'; but most ordinary features face viewers' hesitation about whether to spend three hours.
Creators want longer runtimes to deliver grand narratives, while audiences increasingly prefer short, fast-paced content.
This tension is among the thorniest problems facing the contemporary film industry.
A comparison with Japan's film market is instructive.
The average runtime of Japanese theatrical releases has remained relatively stable, with many commercial films still running 100 to 120 minutes.
That's not because Japanese creators lack ambition, but because Japan has built a mature, diversified revenue system: Blu-ray sales, TV rights, overseas distribution, and merchandise.
A film doesn't need to pack everything into its theatrical run; it can release content in layers across different channels.
What Chinese cinema lacks is precisely this composure.
South Korea's film market provides another benchmark.
South Korean commercial films usually run 110 to 130 minutes. Directors also have artistic ambitions, but studios rigorously calculate returns from the theatrical window.
Thanks to a relatively diversified revenue structure, South Korean studios don't have to pin all their hopes on ticket sales.
That rationality is precisely what Chinese cinema needs to learn.
The deeper problem is that Chinese cinema has yet to establish a healthy business model beyond feature films.
Hollywood has streaming windows, home entertainment, merchandise and theme parks; Japanese animation has Blu-ray, merchandise and overseas licensing.
If a Chinese film's box office falls short of expectations, the whole game may collapse.
That single dependence forces studios to pile on more content in theaters.
Good Films Earn Their Length, Bad Ones Don't
In the end, every debate over runtime circles back to an old question: Is the movie any good?
Ne Zha 2 runs 144 minutes, and audiences willingly sit through it because the storytelling is tight, the emotions are resonant, and the visuals are thrilling.
The Wandering Earth 2, at 173 minutes, rewards repeat viewings because its density of information justifies the runtime.
Chang'an, at 168 minutes, fills every minute with Tang poetry and the splendor of the High Tang era.
These films show that a long runtime can be an asset—if the content earns it.
Conversely, a 110-minute flop can feel like an eternity.
Chaotic pacing, contrived emotions, and redundant information won't vanish with a shorter cut; a longer runtime only amplifies them.
A common moviegoing experience: the first 30 minutes are tolerable, the middle loses your attention, and the final stretch has you checking your watch.
Runtime itself isn't the problem; the question is whether the content justifies it.
Unfortunately, the industry is sending a misguided signal: longer means bigger production, and bigger production means worth watching.
That signal misleads creators into focusing on stretching a film's length rather than making every minute count.
When runtime becomes marketing speak and 'epic feel' becomes a cover for sluggish pacing, audience trust gets slowly eroded.
The 51.832 billion yuan box office in 2025 is a high point, but it doesn't mask another fact: the number of films grossing over 100 million yuan is declining, and audience patience for ordinary long films is waning.
The market is voting with money, and also with absence.
When only mega-blockbusters can drive the overall market and mid-tier films collectively fall silent, the industry's resilience is actually declining.
For audiences, the ideal film market isn't one where everyone makes long films, but where each film is exactly as long as it needs to be.
It's like a pair of shoes: the key isn't the size, but the fit.
For the industry, true maturity isn't about who runs longer, but knowing when to stop.
This logic applies to Hollywood as well.
In recent years, some Hollywood blockbusters have been criticized for being too long. Fast X runs 140 minutes yet only tells half a story, while the Transformers franchise has grown longer with each installment even as its reputation declined.
These cases show that the global film industry faces the same temptations and pitfalls.
The difference is that Hollywood has more room for trial and error, while Chinese cinema has a lower tolerance for mistakes.
Turning to audiences, discussions about film length on social media have settled into a familiar refrain: "If the film is good, even three hours feels short; if it's bad, even 90 minutes feels long."
This statement captures the truth.
Audiences don't oppose long films; they oppose using length to mask thin content.
When creators truly respect narrative efficiency, runtime becomes a natural byproduct rather than something to justify.
In fact, film history has no shortage of long masterpieces.
The Godfather runs 175 minutes, Once Upon a Time in America 229 minutes, and each Lord of the Rings film approaches or exceeds three hours.
These films became classics not because they are long, but because every minute serves character and theme.
What today's Chinese film industry needs to learn is not how to make movies longer, but how to give every minute a reason to exist.
The Last Word
Longer films are essentially an externalization of industry anxiety.
With ticket prices unable to rise, streaming unable to steal audiences, and viewers increasingly demanding, studios have turned runtime into the new competitive dimension.
Audiences think they're getting more for the same price, but they're actually paying a hidden cost in time and physical endurance.
True blockbusters don't need runtime to prove themselves; a confident industry won't make bladder endurance a threshold for moviegoing.
The first principle of film is being good, not being long.
When runtime returns as a narrative tool rather than a marketing weapon, and creators relearn to respect audiences' time and bodies, audiences can rediscover the simplest joy: walking into a theater and watching a movie properly.
Otherwise, runtime becomes an arms race with no winners.
Audiences are exhausted, cinemas are losing money, small and medium films are dying, leaving only a few blockbusters running alone on an increasingly long track.
References.
China's 2025 box office reached 51.832 billion yuan, according to the National Film Administration.
China's 2024 box office surpassed 42.5 billion yuan, according to the National Film Administration.
Spring Festival films are getting longer, with average runtime reaching 130 minutes, according to CNR.
Average runtime for 2025 Spring Festival films rose by nearly 30 minutes, according to Yangcheng Pai.
Lighthouse Professional Edition released pre-sale box office data for the 2025 Spring Festival season.
China's total box office in 2024 was 42.502 billion yuan, according to Xinhua.
The Economist examines why films have been stretched to such absurd lengths.
1905 Movie Network published annual data for China's film industry in 2024.
Maoyan Research: 2024 China Film Market Data Insights.
China Film Association and Lighthouse Research: 2024 China Film Audience Trends Report.
China Youth Net: Are longer movies becoming a trend?
People's Daily Online: China's 2024 box office totals 42.502 billion yuan.