If you thought The Batman‘s reported runtime of almost three hours sounds like a butt-numbing amount of time to spend in a movie theater, consider yourself lucky you won’t have to wait a whole other hour on top of that to finish the film.
A four-hour cut of the Matt Reeves-directed movie was shown to some early test screenings, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Such a runtime, if it were to release officially, would rival the 2021 film Zack Snyder’s Justice League as the longest superhero movie ever. The length of that film was one of the reasons Snyder initially wanted to release Justice League in two parts. However, Warner Bros. ended up cutting down Justice League significantly with the now-notorious reshoots by Joss Whedon to get it out into theaters — in a single installment — in 2017.
Regardless, we doubt very much that slicing an hour off the four-hour runtime will necessarily botch the experience entirely since its finalized runtime of 167 minutes ekes it out to be even longer than Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises (165 minutes) and the longest Batman movie ever.
With so much going on in the movie, we’ll gladly take the sacrifice of hanging out in a movie theater for the equivalent duration of a Monopoly game to make sure everything unfolds in the film the way it should. Reeves will have to introduce a brand new Batman, played by Robert Pattinson, as well as introduce a rogue’s gallery of villains, such as Colin Ferrell’s Penguin, Paul Dano’s Riddler, and Zoë Kravitz’ sometimes-friend / sometimes-foe, Catwoman. Even though it isn’t an origin story for the World’s Greatest Detective, it is still arguably a lot of character development to fit in one movie.
The Batman swoops into theaters March 4.
