It’s really annoying. Who routinely thinks in terms of minutes for numbers over 60, anyway?
I don’t want to have to figure out how prolonged my agony will be while watching, say, “Police Academy XXVI” when I read that it’s 167 minutes long. Why don’t newspapers, studios, Ebert, etc. simply say it’s 2 hrs. 47 mins. long?
Mods, if this should be in MPSIMS, go ahead and move it. Thanks!
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Hmm…maybe Cafe Society???
Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Moved.
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167 minutes is clearer in meaning
Does 2:47 mean “2 hours, 47 minutes”, “2 minutes, 47 seconds” or 2:47 pm?
Given that it would generally be following the word “Duration”, I doubt that is really an issue. Nor do I think most people will confuse the duration of Schindler’s List for just under three minutes.
167 minutes is a pretty damn long movie, especially for the noble Police Academy franchise.
And if you can’t figure out how long a couple hundred minutes is, you are not smart enough to exist in human society.
Yeah but what about those of us in countries with the metric system?
…
I think I need to go and have a drink now.
Just because I could, given enough time, figure out how to set the clock on my VCR still doesn’t give the manufacturer any excuse not to include a manual.
Half the motivation behind all of innovation is to allow sloth (the other half being to increase productivity, which is largely the same thing.)
You still use a VCR?!
That’s it! Out with you!
Often in newspapers, at least, those things are in tiny print in a corner of the page. Maybe originally the decision to list the running time in minutes only was to save space – easier to write 89m (or even just 89) rather than 1hr29m, or even 1:29. If that is indeed the case, maybe the convention just stuck when people started to write running times on videos and websites.
…Or maybe it’s something psychological along the lines of people being more willing to buy something with a price tag marked $1.99 than $2. Maybe on some level 180 minutes sounds less daunting to people than 3 hours.
Well, I’ve seen plenty of DVDs giving the time in hours and minutes. Minutes only is more common, but I’d guess about 30-40% use hours and minutes.
Measure movies in millidays.
“167” is not definited either, only “167 minutes” is. Rather compare to “2 hours, 47 minutes”.
I only think in minutes if I’m doing a short errand. Full length movies are never short, they are usually around an hour and a half, which makes it logical to define them by hours. It’s still as precise.
No, no, it makes sense. A lot of European countries are metric and as a result their hours start long before ours do, so we have to do time conversion. “It’s 10 A.M. here so it’s 4 P.M. in London.” See? you have to add 360 minutes, so if you start with a time signature in minutes it’s easier.
Right? Right?
If this bothers you, don’t ever try to figure out a movie’s year by watching the end credits!
It’s all ball bearings these days.
It’s because they look shorter that way, and Hollywood execs have somehow gotten the idea planted into their head that Americans like shorter movies. Never mind the fact that all of the most successful movies have been on the long side.
A particularly amusing example was Titanic, which was billed as being “2 hours 75 minutes” long. It makes it look like it’s two and three quarters, rather than three and a quarter.
I honestly have no idea why theatres and movie cases show length in just minutes, and I firmly believe movie duration should be expressed in hours and minutes. I still remember that The Lion King is 80 minutes long (plus ou moins) because when I was little I got into an argument with another girl who insisted that The Lion King was 2 hours long and used the case as “proof”. It was years before I found out that 1 hour is 60 minutes.
Do any studios still use roman numerals in their credits anymore? Disney did for years, since they would re-release their movies to theaters every so often, but even they have changed over in the DVD era.
“If you don’t learn Roman numerals, you’ll never learn when major motion pictures were copyrighted.”- Edna Krabappel