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From: My Future Self
Subject: IMDB Film-Length Project
Date: 14 June 2008 12:52
Message-ID: 60 

b3ta newsletter 332 calls for an average film-length graph. 
This idea sounded exciting to me and because I have nothing 
to do anyway in the weekends, I tried to accomplish this 
with IMDB, Notepad, Excel, Notepad, Collectorz Movie 
Collector and Excel (in that order). Here are the results 
and how I did it.

First I went to IMDB to get a list of best voted titles of 
every decade from 1910 to 2009. The newsletter says top 100, 
but I think the top 50 (500 titles in total) is enough and I 
couldn’t find a top 100. Then, I copied the table to 
Notepad, imported the txt into Excel and copied the ‘title’ 
column back to notepad, so I could import it into Collectorz 
Movie Collector. Once imported into Movie Collector, it 
searches the IMDB info for every movie automatically, 
including ‘year’ and ‘film length’. Sometimes it needs a 
little push when there are several titles with the same 
name, but overall this isn’t nearly as time consuming as 
having to do it manually. Once I had done this for every 
decade, I had all the data I needed. On to the science 
stuff!

I’m not an econometrist, so I hope I’m doing this correctly. 
I noticed directly that most old movies are relatively 
short. However, there’s also Les Vampires, a French horror 
movie from 1915 which is 399 minutes! This is also the 
longest film in any of top 50s, followed by Napoleon (1927, 
313 mins). Both are French movies.

In Excel, everyone’s favourite spreadsheet, I imported the 
numbers again and sorted the ‘Running time’ column to get a 
good look. I had to replace all the ‘mins’ with ” because 
otherwise Excel doesn’t get it. Divide by zero et cetera, I 
guess. Now I could finally make a sum and calculate the 
average film-lenghts through the decades.

Here’s a graph of it:

10s ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ 79 minutes
20s ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ 98 minutes
30s ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ 96 minutes
40s ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ 109 minutes
50s ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ 114 minutes
60s ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ 127 minutes
70s ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ 125 minutes
80s ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ 129 minutes
90s ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ 127 minutes
00s ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ 129 minutes

CONCLUSION
Yes, this sort of confirms everyone’s hypothesis that movies 
have become longer. From an average of 79 minutes to a 
whopping 129 minutes. That’s an increase of 63 percent! 
We’re now on par with the 80s, but with a little luck there 
will be a few more blockbusters this year, making it 130 
minutes. However, don’t count on it, because it’s 128,64 
(2000s) against 129,4 (1980s) to be precise. Of course, you 
could also vote more on looong boring movies.

And of course, it’s possible that movies in general haven’t 
become longer. Because I have only picked the top 50 of 
every decade, it’s also possible that people like short 
movies better when they’re old and long movies better when 
they’re new. But I don’t think so, and there is no better 
way of measuring this, I think. Picking fifty random movies 
returns a lot of junk and taking _all_ movies into account 
is unworkable.

Questions or comments? Leave them here on b3ta!


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