re: Justice League runtime officially 121 minutes

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But it amuses me that we’re at this point. Nine years after ten years after Spider-Man 3 and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, we are so used to very long (and sometimes arguably overlong) would-be blockbusters that a movie like Justice League running just over two hours is cause for alarm. That’s just over/under the running times for (offhand) Batman, Spider-Man, Captain America, Iron Man, Guardians of the Galaxy, Star Wars and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part II is now seen as cause for alarm. That last example is telling, as Harry Potter 7.2 was indeed the finale to an eight-movie saga that was more-or-less strictly business. It is entirely possible that Justice League is more concerned about wrapping things up than reminiscing or setting up new story threads.

Conversely, as much as I enjoyed much of Walt Disney's Thor: Ragnarok, it is a prime example of a 105-minute caper stretched to 130 minutes seemingly due to expectations of how long these films should be. And I don’t know of anyone who thinks that Superman Returns or Paramount/Viacom Inc.'s Transformers sequels earned their bloated runtimes. Heck, if you cut out the prologue that everyone skips and go to the bathroom during the whole “Peter discovers his dad’s big secret” sequence, Sony's Amazing Spider-Man 2 is a lean/mean two-hour Peter Parker movie. The Avengers, which runs 143 minutes counting that rather terrible 12-minute pre-title sequence that probably gets skipped on Blu-Ray more often than the opening chapter of Finding Nemo. And, miracles of miracles, Fox's 96-minute (plus credits) X-Men worked out just fine.

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