4) The Lord of the Rings
If you were to sit down to watch Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy on Blu-Ray in its entirety, you would have to be parked in front of the screen for over 12 hours. That’s quite the commitment.
It’s also the equivalent of about a single season of Game of Thrones. Now granted, that show separates itself into hour-long episodes, but just as it’s designed as a show that can be stopped and started again, so too are the Lord of the Rings movies. It helps that they depict worlds so foreign to our own that it doesn’t take long for them to grab our attention.
And while I agree that Jackson’s Hobbit movies don’t quite live up to the revolutionary quality of the earlier Lord of the Rings films, I have no issue with how long they go on for. They’re meant to be a bit of a slog, I think, and to at times portray tedium, while ultimately representing, again, the feeling of a long journey. Unless you shoot the majority of your movie in long takes, the way Cuarón does in Gravity, where your awareness of the passage of time is heightened, ending it after 90 minutes will not feel like a very substantial or epic voyage. Every detail included in the ever-expanding Middle Earth saga provides a greater texture for the world it brings to life.
