Apple TV+
Ridley Scott has done it again. The master of director’s cuts, who for decades has managed to get sci-fi nerds fiercely debating which of the seven (!) different versions of Blade Runner reigns supreme, is unleashing the beast of the genre: a whopping four-hour edition of his new Joaquin Phoenix-starring historical epic Napoleon, which will be released on Apple TV+ after its current theatrical run.
Actually, the longer cut will run 4 hours and 10 minutes, according to Scott, still making cinematic mischief at 85 years old. “I’m working on it,” the director recently teased of his latest behemoth edit. “It was four [hours] 10 [minutes] this morning.” That’s an extra 92 minutes of footage beyond what exists now, which is not exactly brief at 2 hours and 38 minutes. In other words, this is a film on top of a film.
If that sounds unbearably protracted and exhausting, you’re hardly alone in thinking so. Many bladders were tested during this year’s acclaimed, three-hour-plus Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon, by the capital-I Important filmmakers Christopher Nolan and Martin Scorsese, respectively. I thought both were brilliant, and deeply in need of a proper intermission. (Instead, Scorsese and company have cracked down on theaters inserting their own intermissions.) That and the bloat of many Marvel blockbusters have led to investigations by The Economist, Vanity Fair, and NPR, which all basically found that, yeah, movies really are longer these days (though we’ve gone through previous waves of way-long hit films).