Caroline Turner, Opinions Editor 

My time is precious. Between work, school, family, errands, and the hundred other things that seem to fill a day, finding an hour or two to dedicate to myself can feel like a luxury and I’m sure that I’m not the only person who feels this way. When you do find that time, what can you do with it? 

Sometimes, I want to watch a movie. Not start a new series that will demand another 10 hours of my life and not commit to a two-and-a-half-hour epic that will consume the rest of my evening. I want something that lets me sit down, enjoy a story, and spend a little doing something that is entirely for me. 

That’s why I love 90-minute movies. And I think we could use more of them. 

My love of 90-minute movies isn’t that I think movies should cater to my allegedly microscopic attention span. It’s that 90 minutes is a meaningful amount of time without being an intimidating amount of time. In a life where free time often comes in inconvenient scraps, the difference between 90 minutes and two and a half hours matters. 

I navigate my free time by still asking questions about what I should prioritize. Most nights it’s cooking dinner, reading for 15 minutes, calling a friend who I need to catch up with, or folding the laundry that’s been in my dryer far too long. None of these tasks take particularly long, but they do take time. 

And when time is limited, even the things I do purely for myself have to compete for it. Watching a movie is supposed to be leisure, but that doesn’t mean the time it takes somehow doesn’t count. When a movie asks for 2.5 to 3 hours, I’m not just deciding if I want to watch it; I’m deciding what else I’m willing to give up to watch it. 

This is why I miss the 90-minute movie. It occupies a strange but useful middle ground: long enough to be a complete experience, but short enough that watching one doesn’t require me to reorganize my entire evening. 

Most new movies seem to be part of two extremes. There are occasional short comedies and animated films that hover around 90-minutes, but many major releases surpass the 2-hour mark. Television becomes an obvious alternative, but more shows on streaming services are released as seasons that are pushed to be consumed in a single weekend. 

90-minute movies offer something neither option does: a complete story with a manageable time commitment. 

TV is great for stories that need to breathe. But I can’t always become invested in a story that will take six, eight, or 20 hours to finish. I don’t want to wonder if I’ll have time to watch another episode in a week. I want to watch something tonight and know that by the time the credits roll I’ve experienced the whole thing. And while some people seem perfectly capable of watching one episode of a show before going to bed, I am not one of those people. “Just one episode” has never been a realistic expectation. 

I’m not saying that every movie needs to be 90 minutes. Some stories need 3 hours. Some of my favorite films are long, and cutting them to meet a seemingly arbitrary runtime would make them worse. A movie should be as long as its story requires. 

But the reverse is also true. A movie shouldn’t be made longer simply because longer movies are seen as more substantial. Every movie doesn’t need a second and third subplot that adds little or nothing to the main story. Some action sequences could be cut in half and still get the point across. A movie’s runtime should serve the story, not the other way around. 

There is also something appealing about the modesty of a 90-minute movie. Not every piece of entertainment needs to be an event. We spend enough of our lives optimizing our time by maximizing productivity and planning what’s next. Leisure shouldn’t have to feel like another commitment. 

Sometimes doing something for yourself means spending an hour and a half watching a ridiculous comedy or a thriller that seems to move at a faster pace than normal. That isn’t a waste of time. That’s what time for yourself is for. 

When I have a free evening, I don’t want fewer choices. I want more. Give me the three-hour movie epic when I have a Saturday afternoon to spare. Give me the eight-episode series when I want to sit with something for a while. But give me a 90-minute movie when I have an hour and a half and want to do something purely for myself. 

Ninety minutes is long enough to escape for a while—and short enough to still have a life after the credits roll.