Quote:
Originally Posted by 77T
There is so much to unpack in your questions and point of view that I hope you’ll accept this general opinion. Length doesn’t matter if one is immersed in the cinematic experience.
The filmmaker has only a few minutes to suspend your disbelief. Once you are living within his/her defined world, the story can not become lazy regardless of its context. It must remain faithful to the premise or a viewer’s mind will wander back into the real world. And when that happens people will complain.
We must be unconsciously side-slipped into a defining moment that resonates with our own experiences. The more universal emotions that the filmmaker taps into, the greater emancipation of emotions are shifted to an individual and collective experience. An example of this successfully executed theory is when nearly all of the audience gasps in unison. That is whether it is a shocking surprise, an emotional delight or disappointment, a joyful moment or due to an elaboration of our unconscious deeply held beliefs.
Now there are new viewers who need a different approach to willingly enter the filmmaker’s world. Many won’t unless it is totally immersive - as in VR gaming. That will be a challenge for the film companies as well as the exhibitors.
In the future, a traditional movie house may morph into a high bandwidth BT-connected VR streaming media center. You’ll bring your own headset (a’la Oculus) and become part of the “movie” to the extent that characters will seem to interact versus act. This would allow multi-threaded story lines to have more than one resonance with the audience who has now become participants.
Now where’s my popcorn??? 
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I concur with a lot of this.
The thing we also have to remember is that in the 1930s about 65% of Americans went to the movies. Adults and kids in the same theater. Most stories were almost American propaganda movies with happy endings and through the Depression, made to cheer people up. Basic escapism.
During WW2 movies were a continuation of the propaganda to rally the citizens on a war that was not going well early on.
After television became a thing in every home the percentage of people that went to movies went way down and the movies were targeted to basically dating teenagers and people in their 20s.
That has continued to this day, and now people have a far different attention span than they had years and decades before. Movies now are also made for a worldwide audience instead of just basically and American one, and that shift happened with the concept of the blockbuster with movies like Jaws and Star Wars and due to the fact that the movie business was bought up by major corporations, instead of just movies studios.
So everything has changed, the age of the moviegoer, the worldwide audience, the use of CGI tech, and how even adults can't sit still for more than 2 hours, has affected how movies are made.
Now with streaming and venues like Netflix new trends like long series and bingewatching has changed the landscape as well. So things like The Irishman can be made in a long form and watched at your leisure, where young people and the bladder challenged can watch and pause and watch tomorrow.
Not many people today would be able to go to a theater and watch Lawrence of Arabia at 3 hours and 48 minutes, no matter how good it is.
The story dates to 1914-18, the movies was made in 1962 and every decision made at the time had a direct affect on the Middle East and our world today one hundred years later.