Last week, Captain Marvel officially received an MPAA rating of PG-13, and while the news didn’t come as particularly surprising, the development did indicate that the theatrical cut of the film has now been completed. This in turn implies that the movie’s official runtime has finally been set in stone, and sure enough, after a few weeks of sites listing similar but contradictory lengths for Carol Danvers’ MCU debut, it looks like cinema chains are starting to share the final figure.
Though AMC Theaters previously listed the runtime of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s film as 2 hours and 10 minutes, that number has now been changed to 2 hours and 4 minutes. Should this be the length that Marvel Studios is sticking with, it’d make Captain Marvel a little shorter than average by recent MCU standards.
In fact, out of the eight movies released so far in Marvel’s Phase 3, the only entries to run shorter than 124 minutes are Doctor Strange (115 minutes) and Ant-Man and the Wasp (118 minutes). In what seems like a fitting coincidence, however, it looks like Captain Marvel will be of roughly the same length as that other MCU period film that saw a Captain make their solo debut – that is, 2011’s Captain America: The First Avenger.
The tighter runtime could perhaps be a result of the film’s relatively isolated slot in the MCU timeline. With the movie taking place over a decade before the events of 2008’s franchise-founding Iron Man, the film doesn’t have as many characters or events to connect the action, freeing it up to keep the focus on Carol Danvers in her first big screen adventure.
We’ll find out if Captain Marvel’s concise length leaves audiences wanting more when the film hits theaters on March 8th, 2019, before Carol shows up in what looks to be a much longer movie when Avengers: Endgame comes out on April 26th.
