The average length of movies is 106.91 minutes

As you would know if you've been keeping up with The Audient, I recently started going back and filling in all the movies I had not yet added to my big movie spreadsheet, which I stopped updating in 2022 while continuing to update its Microsoft Word counterpart. Keeping up that one is much easier as it is just a giant list of titles. I won't go into again why I stopped or why I started again, but if you want to catch up on that discussion you can find it here. 

What I do want to get into is that this project has seemed to help me find a potential universal average length for movies. Not just the movies I've seen, but all movies.

One of the pieces of data I keep about each movie is its running time. I did this primarily for a silly project that I posted about here, when I wanted to choose my favorite movie at each length. Now I just do it out of habit and because it's easy enough to keep doing, though it does mean I have to go to IMDB for each movie I add, which is just the sort of thing that might make this catch-up project seem daunting enough to discontinue it. In many cases I can remember the release year and the director of the movie, and of course whether I liked it or not, but rarely if ever will I actually remember its exact length. Fortunately, so far it has not seemed like a disqualifying hardship to do this, and I'm down to less than 600 movies I still need to add (starting at more than 800). 

Because I was keeping track of the length anyway, I also created a calculation that would add up all the minutes and divide it by the total number of values, so I could see a running average of the length of the movies I watch.

And this average length is always, or immediately comes back to if it strays from it temporarily, 106.91 minutes.

In fact, so often have I added another movie and seen this as the total running average that I have several times checked to make sure that the calculation hadn't stopped calculating for some reason.

When you get to a certain number of samples in any group -- and at this writing I am at 6315, with 587 still to go -- the statistics you can derive from it are long past the point of significant. So the fact that new titles cannot move this number much one way or another means that this is a true representation of the average length of movies I see.

And really, that would also make it a true representation of the average length of movies everybody sees.

We can put some asterisks on this. There are some people who watch largely romantic comedies and don't have the stomach or the attention span for big epics that run more than three hours. They undoubtedly have a lower average running time. Then there are those people who only like the latter and don't like the former, which means they are seeing much longer movies on average.

But we aren't trying to find out this number for viewers who profile one way or another. We're trying to find it for a hypothetical viewer who watches anything, regardless of length or subject matter, with no preference for movies in any particular genre.

Such as a critic. Such as myself.

The fact that it keeps coming back to this 91/100ths of this minute -- not 89, not 93 -- means that there seems to be a sort of granular accuracy to this, almost one we can take to the bank. I'll be curious to see how close we are to it after I add the other 587 titles I still have to add, which are also drawn from a random period of time in my life in which I did not consciously err toward one type of movie over another (which describes every large sample size from my viewing life, larger than a few months anyway). But I suspect we'll be right on it or fairly close.

This project has one other average that I can sort of take to the bank, though I think this one I may have mentioned at some point before. (I don't want to go digging for it, but it's long enough ago that you likely won't blame me if I repeat myself.)

Namely, I seem to like exactly 68.12 percent of the movies I see.

I am also keeping a running list of the total liked vs. the total disliked, which at this writing is 4302 pro and 2013 con. (Yes, it seemed like a landmark moment when I passed 2000 movies I didn't like, but since I was adding my movies in reverse chronological order, it was not possible to know which was my 2000th disliked movie.) 

Every time I add a new movie, I notice whether this percentage goes up or down. But in the time I've been adding these titles over the past week or so, it is have never gotten above 68.17% or below 68.05%. And as soon as it heads toward one of those extremes it immediately reverts back to the norm.

I actually kind of want it to go down below 68% because the lower it gets, the more it means I am holding movies to a higher standard and not just giving them a pass with a milquetoast thumbs up. Then again, the more movies I watch that I like, the more it means I am making positive use of my one wild and precious life, so I am happy to just let the numbers go where they will.

So I guess the real takeaway is, for you in the reading audience, if you are watching a movie that is 105 minutes or shorter, think of it as a win, because you're watching a shorter than average movie. 

And let's not delve too deeply into the reality that we love movies but that we rejoice when we discover they will take up less of our time.