18 Movies That Were Too Long For No Good Reason

Most of the longest movies Hollywood has released are epic stories that run long because they have a lot of sensational drama and action. You typically don't find comedies like Funny People sharing the same internet space as Dances with Wolves. Still, the movie has an incredibly long runtime for an Adam Sandler flick, most of which are way shorter than two hours.

Funny People isn't like most of Sandler's comedies because it's primarily a dramatic telling of the behind-the-scenes life of comedians. Sandler plays a stand-up turned movie star named George Simmons, who is diagnosed with cancer. After the diagnosis, he returns to doing stand-up and tries to better himself, and it ultimately ends after he's cured and returns to his pre-cancer ways.

The film's story is excellent, but after Sandler's character is cured of his deadly disease, he regresses. This upends much of the work he'd done up to that point, and the film could have ended with his cure and been done with it. Granted, that's not the story writer/director Judd Apatow wanted to tell, but it would have made for a shorter and possibly better film.

The Transformers franchise exists for two reasons: people love nostalgia, and they also love seeing giant robots fight. The story elements are somewhat secondary to those aspects of the movies, but they're successful, which is why they keep pumping them out every few years. The fourth entry, Age of Extinction, offers more of the same, but it does so at a wholly unnecessary two-hour and 45-minute runtime, which is a long time to watch robots fighting it out.

When the movie was released, many critics wrote about its length, suggesting it was too long and that its various plots were bloated and incoherent. This makes it challenging to remain engaged in the film as it drags beyond what is necessary. While Age of Extinction isn't the lowest-rated movie of the franchise on Rotten Tomatoes, it's not much better than The Last Knight, which is 11 minutes shorter than Age of Extinction.

The first Avatar film was two hours and 42 minutes long, so few people thought James Cameron's second entry in his epic franchise would be shorter. Still, it was a bit surprising when The Way of Water came out and ran for three hours and 12 minutes, which doesn't just seem like a long time to sit in a movie theater – it most certainly is. The film picks up the story from the first film and changes locales to a primarily oceanic area of Pandora.

Eventually, the humans find Jake (Sam Worthington) and his family, resulting in a climactic battle at the movie's end. The beginning and end of the film are well-timed, but the middle section lags on for a long time. Much of this could have been trimmed down or removed completely without cutting into the main plot. Many of these scenes deal with the children adapting to their new environment, and elements of these scenes could have been cut entirely without anyone noticing at all.

Eternals is not the best-received of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's films, but it's also not the worst. Still, it offers up something new to the franchise by delving into the history of humanity and how the Eternals influenced it from the background. The film also reveals much of the universal impact the Celestials have, expanding the MCU further into the cosmic aspects of the comic books more than anything that preceded it.

The film is long, clocking in at two hours and 36 minutes. This is primarily due to the complicated plot that begins at the dawn of history and continues into the modern day. Add to that a mystery, an investigation, and plenty of intrigue culminating in a final engagement between allies, and you've got a long movie on your hands. Some elements could have been edited down or removed to streamline the film, but it would be difficult to trim more than 10 to 15 minutes without completely mucking up the plot.

Australia is an epic adventure set in the eponymous country, focusing on Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman) and The Drover (Hugh Jackman). The film is relatively long, running for two hours and 45 minutes, and much of the runtime is taken up by the development of the characters. 

A specific focus on the relationship between the Aborigines and the white people continues for an extended period. This is necessary as it depicts the cruel treatment of the Aborigines but could be edited down for brevity. The film could benefit from some trimming of the developing relationships. 

Much of what takes up the film's length could be inferred as subtext in lieu of outright exposition. Trimming this down could result in a much smoother film with fewer pacing issues and more focus on what matters in telling the story. Of course, the film's director Baz Luhrmann also released an extended miniseries cut of the film in 2023, so what do we know?

2017's Justice League went through some production problems that involved a change in director midway through. This resulted in Joss Whedon taking the reigns from Zack Snyder, who suffered a tragic loss and couldn't continue. While it eventually made over $650 million at the global box office, it came in well under its break-even point, costing the studio quite a bit. After this, die-hard fans begged Warner Bros. to release the so-called “Snyder Cut” of the film.

It took a few years, but in 2021, Warner Bros. complied and released Zack Snyder's Justice League for streaming on HBO Max. The film came in at a whopping four hours and two minutes in length, making it 122 minutes longer than the original version. This was done, in part, as fan service. While Snyder's film wouldn't have come in anywhere near that long were it released as intended in 2017, the streaming platform allowed for a much longer version.

This effectively amounted to a director's cut with every would-be deleted scene included from the get-go. While long, it's watchable and, in many ways, better than Whedon's cut. Still, it's quite long and could have been trimmed down to under three hours had the studio wanted to go that route.