Datawizart
Datawizart
It feels like a film now eats two hours without trying. We checked 37,500 popular films from 1950 to 2024 — and then asked whether the longer ones are actually rated any better.
Scroll to begin“Median runtime” on this page means: half the films are shorter, half are longer.
The median runtime of popular films rose from 89 minutes in the 1950s to 105 minutes in the 2010s. Count every valid film instead and it goes the other way: 90 down to 88 minutes.
With all genres pooled, the median runtime moves 89 → 95 → 96 → 97 → 100 → 102 → 105 minutes from the 1950s to the 2010s.
The 2020–2024 figure already reaches 109 minutes, but that window is only five years — so it is not compared as a full decade.
Crime moved furthest: 84 to 107 minutes. Comedy moved least, but still climbed from 92 to 101 minutes.
Per-genre detail is available from the buttons after the main story.
The median rating climbs from 6.0 for films of 40–79 minutes to 7.0 for films of 120–149 minutes. Films over three hours reach 7.5 — but there are only 305 of them.
Across the 37,500 popular films, the runtime–rating relationship is clear enough. Across 273,741 rated films, it is almost flat.
So it is not that “longer means better”. What we see depends heavily on which films became popular in the first place.
This part is optional. Pick a genre to see its popular films by period without scrolling through ten more steps.
But that relationship nearly disappears once the whole catalogue is counted. So the conclusion is not “longer is better” — it is that popularity filters which films we actually see and rate.
This data shows association, not cause. Adding runtime does not automatically raise a rating.
We used IMDb data pulled on 1 August 2026. “Popular films” means the 500 titles with the most votes in each release year — not the 500 biggest films of all time.
| Step | Removed | Remaining |
|---|---|---|
| All IMDb titles | — | 12,684,360 |
| Movies only | 11,930,645 | 753,715 |
| Drop adult titles | 9,118 | 744,597 |
| Released 1950–2024 | 217,763 | 526,834 |
| Runtime 40–300 minutes | 124,688 | 402,146 |
| Has a rating record | 128,405 | 273,741 |
| Top 500 per year | 236,241 | 37,500 |
Each row is one ten-year period. Horizontal position is runtime, so the further right a dot sits, the longer the film.
To stop the rows turning into a blob, the chart draws a fixed sample of at most 260 films per period. The median line is still computed from every film in that group.
A film can carry more than one genre, so film counts across genres must not be added together.
The rating analysis compares the 37,500 popular films against 273,741 valid films that carry a rating. IMDb ratings come from users who chose to rate, not from a random sample of all viewers.
Source: IMDb Non-Commercial Datasets ↗
Below is the popular-film data used in the analysis. Search a title, pick a period or genre, then click a column heading to sort.