Movies and TV Shows

This is an interesting graph! I think the phenomenon of longer runtimes has two major reasons:

1. Streaming Studios are much less stringent with how long a movie can be since it's less of a concern how many times it can be shown per day/theatre. Also, runtime doesn't matter as much when the viewers can pause and return to it whenever they please. This is encouraged by streaming services because it also increases the overall time spent in the app.

2. The vanishing of medium-budget movies High-profile, high-budget movies by known directors have always been longer on average, because they can afford to do so and are expected to draw large audiences. In recent years the number of mid-budget movies, the likes we are used to from pre-2010, has drastically decreased in favor of big blockbuster productions (here's an article about it). So the average runtime has increased as a consequence of this.

I personally don't like this trend. Although I really enjoy longer movies, most of them wind up with obnoxious amounts of badly written filler-content.

One thing people probably aren't considering is tapes. They had a literal length to them. I remember Titanic was a 2 tape set because it was so long. That meant, movies wanted to meaningfully hit the home market, they had to be short enough to fit on one tape, including any preroll advertisements the studio wanted the squeeze in.

DVDs helped a little, but they took were constrained, and were trying to pack in additional features while they were at it.

Now all bets are off in the home market. Even TV shows have started changing to match the format. Streaming first shows are often variable length per episode. Rather than try to fit a specific size, they run until the story is told, like a movie.

That peak in the early 2000s has to be the extended LOTR trilogy. Which I'm very happy to watch

From the data, it looks like average lengths have gone down since about 2004, so this year may just be an anomaly.