Movies, Pacing, and Books

For economic and practical reasons, most movies have a run time of 1½ to 2½ hours. But what if time constraints could be removed and audiences would sit through an entertaining movie of any length? How much longer would films run and would their content have to change to keep the audience in their seats?

There are many examples of movies that are both long and successful. Avatar, the top grossing film of all time, had a run time of 2 hours and 42 minutes. Titanic at 3 hours and 14 minutes is the second top grossing film. The three movies of The Lord of the Rings trilogy were all around three hours in length and individually are the 33rd, 24th, and 7th highest grossing films.

But The Lord of the Rings, both the movie and the books on which it is based, is really one story told in three parts. A single “super movie” would be over 9 hours in length with combined grosses placing it ahead of Avatar.

Because the story is a sweeping epic, it’s hard to envision these movies being shorter and still doing justice to the source material. You can even argue that the extended versions of the films, which bring the total length to over 11 hours, fill in missing pieces making the story more enjoyable.

So if a 9 hour movie can be good and an 11 hour movie (possibly) as good or better, would making movies longer make them better?

The Avengers, perhaps the best (or at the very least one of the best) superhero movies ever made clocks in at 2 hours and 23 minutes. It’s the third top grossing film. Would this movie have been twice as good if it were twice as long? I don’t think so. You could add additional subplots and lengthen the actions sequences, but I doubt this would have made the movie better.

On the other hand, every M. Night Shyamalan movie feels like it’s thirty minutes too long. Even The Sixth Sense, which I liked quite a bit, drags at points. Cutting at least ten minutes out of the running time of 1 hour and 47 minutes would have made it a better film.

Why is this?

Pacing.

Stories have rhythm. If it’s too fast, then we wonder why things happen. If it’s too slow, then we wait for things to happen. If it’s just right then we get caught up in the story and lose track of time.

The Sixth Sense presents too little story in too much time. A point is reached where we understand that Cole is a troubled child who has disturbing supernatural events occurring around him. We also understand that Malcolm, the child psychiatrist who is trying to help him, is troubled in his own way. We’re ready to move on to the next thing—for the characters to begin working on a resolution for their problems—but instead the film keeps focusing on the problem for far too long before finally coming to a resolution and satisfying conclusion.

The editing process, driven by practicality of run times, generally makes movies better. No amount of editing is going to turn hours and hours of bad footage into an oscar winner, but it stands to reason that if you take the best footage, sequence it properly, and leave the rest on the cutting room floor, you’ll probably have the best film you can make.

For good films this often means the hard choice of not including some footage. In Alien, a cut scene reveals the fate of Dallas and Brett who had been earlier captured by the xenomorph. It revealed some intriguing information about the alien’s life cycle, but placing it in the middle of Ripley’s frantic escape from the Nostromo before it self-destructed would have disrupted the pacing of that sequence. Similarly in Aliens, there is a cut scene in which Ripley learns that her young daughter lived out her life and died during the 57 years she was adrift in space suspended in hypersleep. This short scene makes it easy to see how Ripley would view Newt as a surrogate daughter, risking her own life to rescue her from the depths of the alien hive. But is it an essential scene to understand Ripley’s motivation? I would say the answer is no. From the interaction shown in the movie, it’s believable that Ripley would risk her life to save this child and thus the scene can be cut without diminishing the film.

What these cuts illustrate is that in well-made movies, every scene should be questioned before being included in the final cut. Does this scene serve a purpose? Is this scene needed to advance the plot? Is the movie better with this scene in it and worse without it?

I wish every book author went through this process, especially once they became successful.

When a film franchise becomes successful, the films don’t typically become longer and longer. If anything increases, it’s usually the budget and production values—once you’ve proven something is successful spending more money on it is less of a risk.

When a book franchise becomes successful, the same is not always true. I’ve graphed the page counts of a number of fantasy book series I’ve enjoyed reading: Discworld, Xanth, Harry Potter, and Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter. I’ve only graphed the first ten books in these series with the exception of Harry Potter which consists of just seven books.



First, I love the Discworld books written by Terry Pratchett. Every book he writes is just as long as it needs to be. And funny never gets old—his dialogue, descriptions, observations, and plots always ooze with his unique sense of humor. I’ve read 33 out of the 40 books currently in the series and haven’t grown tired of them yet. His books show a modest increase in size as the series became successful with the 33rd being only 50% longer than the first.

The Xanth series by Piers Anthony is one I started reading when I was in High School and I still have very fond memories of them. I started reading them again as an adult and finished 25 out the 38 currently in the series. The books have always had pun-derived humor, but the latter books began to focus less and less on plot and characters and more and more on puns (which eventually became too pun-ishing for me), so I lost interest in the series. As the graph shows, the length of his first ten books was the most consistent of the four series. This trend continued in his latter books with the 25th being only 9% longer than the first. He clearly has a feel for the length for the stories he wants to tell and crafts his plots to fall within the desired range.

Next is the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling. It’s insane to argue about the formula for books as wildly successful as these, but I’m going to remove my tin foil hat and make an attempt.

I can’t think of better examples of how to craft plots than the first three books in this series. Everything in the stories serves a purpose. The pacing is just right and you’re never left waiting for things to happen. The latter books, however, feel bloated in comparison. Subplots abound that serve little purpose in the greater arc of the story and it takes far too long to resolve many issues.

I’m not arguing that the last four books are bad; I enjoyed them. I just think they could have been better. Look at the modest increase in size for books 2 and 3 in the series. Now look at how the page count sky rockets for books 4 and 5. The fifth book in the series is 278% longer than the first. It’s certainly not 278% better.

That’s because more of the same thing is not always the same thing. The experience of eating one piece of candy is not the same as eating one hundred pieces of candy—in one case, you wish you could eat more and in the other you wish you had eaten less.

Making your books twice as long is not twice as much of the same thing—it’s something different. It’s a different formula. It’s New Coke vs. Classic Coke. Even if you like New Coke better, you can’t reasonably argue that it’s the same thing as Classic Coke.

The same is true for the Harry Potter series. The formula for the first three books is clearly different than that for the last four. The expanding plot changed the pacing of the stories for the worse, not the better. It wasn’t enough of a change that I stopped reading the series, but it was enough that I enjoyed the latter stories to a lesser extent.

Finally, there’s the Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter novels by Laurell K. Hamilton, which started out strong, but slowly bloated over time. The tenth was the last I read before giving up on the series. It was 241% longer than the original novel—it was also 241% worse.

Here’s the deal. If you have common scenes in every book you write, you have to be really careful with pacing. Once your reader gets through one elaborate description of someone getting dressed, eating a meal, channeling supernatural power, or pulling out a gun during a tense confrontation, reading similar passages becomes less and less interesting. If your books remain the same length, no worries. But if they become longer and longer by including more and more of the same old thing, then you really need to find an editor who’s willing to challenge everything you write, regardless of how well your books are selling.

As a reader, this is my plea to authors. Edit your books like movies. Set a reasonable limit, say 400 pages, and then trim your story, keeping only the best parts, until it fits within that self-imposed limit. Then add pieces back only if you can justify their inclusion.

I’m not saying you can’t write a masterpiece that would be diminished by the omission of a single word—I’m saying that if you think you can, you probably can’t.