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December 13

Length of movies

Hi! Wouldn't it make more sense to write the length of movies in hours rather than in minutes? I think people can relate more to 1 hour 20 minutes than to 80 minutes. What do you think? 2402:800:6172:7D0F:1DC4:1306:486A:2CE9 (talk) 19:04, 13 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I think your suggestion is a sign that Mathematics education is going downhill. HiLo48 (talk)

Simple arithmetic, even. Say a movie is 140 minutes. That's 60 * 2 + 20. Easy as can be. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 05:11, 14 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Where have you seen reliable sources calling for this? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:24, 13 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

He's talking about the length of films given in movie infoboxes on this site. That's a question of WP style, nothing to do with sources. --Viennese Waltz 21:35, 13 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

He might be, but I don't know, not being a mind-reader. In any case, the question of who can "relate" better to hours + minutes vs. just minutes is a personal opinion. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 03:14, 14 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I'm fairly sure length in minutes is the standard way of doing it. Not just on WP. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 06:08, 14 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Aside from whether it is done elsewhere, putting all run times in total minutes as opposed to hours and minutes makes them more easily comparable. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 13:41, 14 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

AllMovie reports the runtime of Oppenheimer the standard way as "Run Time - 181 min" and IMDB has "180 min", but uses "R | 3h 0min | Biography, Drama | 21 Jul 2023 (USA) | Movie" in their "Reference View", while Rotten Tomatoes writes "R 2023, History/Drama, 3h 0m". The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from. --Lambiam 16:35, 14 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

For a movie of 140 minutes, maybe the OP would prefer to see it expressed as 2.3333 hours. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:50, 14 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

That does not conform to the example in the posting. I think the suggestion is sensible, but this is not a forum for opinions. Since this is the Reference Desk, are there any style guides that address this specific subject? --142.112.220.136 (talk) 23:34, 14 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

A better place to discuss this is at Template talk:Infobox film. --Lambiam 23:28, 13 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The OP wrote "I think people can relate more to 1 hour 20 minutes than to 80 minutes." Personally, I find the two examples equally simple. I wonder if there is any research on this stuff? HiLo48 (talk) 01:34, 15 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I could not find anything immediately; the key words I used were probably too many and too generic. Anecdotal data point, worth what you paid for this information: Last week I planned on seeing a movie and wanted to make reservations for dinner after the show. The cinema advertised the start time as 6 PM, and its running time as 104 minutes, no intermissions ... in my head, I actually had to first subtract 60 from 104 to know that the film was expected to end around 7:44 PM. No problem or complaints about having to do mental calculation, but in this particular case "104 minutes" took this human brain longer to get to the desired result than 1h44m (or however it should be formatted) would have. ---Sluzzelin talk 02:48, 15 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I mean, part of the problem is that we generally measure things in hours, i.e., no one says it's been 623 minutes since midnight, just "10:23", so you need to do the conversion. It's certainly not hard but it's there, a brief 'lag', so to speak (but minor compared to the length of the film). But personally I prefer it in minutes because you rarely need to deal with those repeating decimals; seconds are minor enough that it doesn't particularly matter if you're off by fifty-nine of them. 71.112.180.130 (talk) 13:55, 17 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Very few films run in the neighborhood of 623 minutes. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:18, 17 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I once sat through the Sergei Bondarchuk version of War and Peace in one sitting. It lasted 431 minutes (7 hours, 11 minutes), plus 3 intermissions, for a total time commitment of 8 hours. What a bum-numbing experience. I've since seen it again on TV, over 4 nights as was originally intended. Much more palatable. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 21:05, 17 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Beaten by Sátántangó: running time 439 minutes. --Lambiam 10:52, 20 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Reliable sources, e.g. the British Board of Film Classification (explicitly cited as a reliable source for film length in Template:Infobox film), the British Film Institute, the Library of Congress, use minutes. Clarityfiend (talk) 13:54, 16 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

But they're reliable as regards content, not style. I mean, you wouldn't automatically follow them if they tell you whether a movie is in "color" or "colour", would you? --142.112.220.136 (talk) 04:10, 18 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Is there some difference between a British minute and an American minute? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 07:42, 18 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

New York Minutes may be shorter, being composed of New York seconds. -- Verbarson ^talk_edits 11:42, 18 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Huh? You're not making much sense. If reliable sources pretty much all agree on format, why would we buck the consensus? We follow the crowd; we don't lead it. Clarityfiend (talk) 08:55, 18 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Reliable sources provide our content, not our formatting. Our formatting is set by the Wikipedia Manual of Style, though I don't see anything that covers this particular situation. Matt Deres (talk) 02:31, 19 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

If an article is on a British subject, it's written in British English. Analogously, if it's a cinema article, we use standard cinematic formatting. Clarityfiend (talk) 15:21, 19 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

If there is such a thing. --142.112.220.136 (talk) 00:55, 20 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

But who told you that "If an article is on a British subject, it's written in British English."? Oddly enough, it comes from the Wikipedia Manual of Style which, as I said, is what dictates our format. But you already knew that. Matt Deres (talk) 18:51, 20 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]