The Battle of the Long, Long Films

With Star Wars: The Force Awakens soon to be coming out in theaters, it seems like every youtuber and blogger out there is trying get some angle or other on it. Well, this blog won't be caught up in the hype. Could you imagine? Our first blog post in a month being something about Star Wars! No.

. . .

Okay, maybe. Just a tiny post. See, something that recently caught the attention of Cosmo and I were the lengths of several blockbuster hits. As the audience, you're expected to sit through hours of the heroes marching through seemingly endless plots. Peter Jackson's baby, The Hobbit trilogy, was 7.9 hours total (474 minutes). That's how long it'd take to watch all three films back to back. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is 9.3 hours long (558 minutes). All the Hobbit and LoTR movies together are 17.2 hours long. This isn't even counting all the extra footage and deleted material.

The prequel trilogy of Star Wars is roughly 6.4 hours (376 minutes) and the original series is about 7 hours (416 minutes). Before I bore you with numbers, let me just say that together they are 13.4 hours, so the LoTR-Hobbit combo wins out.

That's why The Force Awakens is so important to this imaginary, pointless contest Cosmo and I have invented. It won't be able to put the Star Wars series over 17.2 hours, but what if it were to spawn a whole new trilogy? Disney would be losing money if it didn't do that, right? That could potentially catapult Star Wars over LoTR/Hobbit and maybe even over the eight films of the Harry Potter franchise, which are 19.65 hours in length (1179 minutes).

Edit: I'm told that there really is going to be a new Star Wars trilogy, so there we go. Star Wars will win.