Summary
- Long, epic movies like Gone With The Wind are falling out of fashion, making it unlikely that its record for longest Best Picture winner will be broken.
- The Academy Awards prioritize artistic merit over box office popularity, favoring serious period pieces like Killers of the Flower Moon and Oppenheimer.
- Contemporary cinema trends show that most major movies now fall closer to a brisk 90 minutes, making it difficult for any film to beat Gone With The Wind's record.
While one 2023's biggest and best movies fell somewhere between the two.
This trend is likely to impact competitors at the 2024 Oscars, since the Academy Awards typically focus more on artistic merit than box office popularity when it comes to selecting nominees. Many of the past year’s most critically acclaimed movies, the likes of Killers of the Flower Moon and Oppenheimer, are the kind of lengthy, serious historical period pieces that have a long tradition of winning over Academy voters. None of the 2024 Best Picture Oscars contenders, however, are capable of beating a record that has lasted 85 years.
Oscars 2024: Final Winner Predictions For All 23 Categories
The Oscars 2024 race is almost at its end, with Oppenheimer hoping to dominate at the 96th Academy Awards. Can any of the other movies stop it?
Gone With The Wind Is Still The Longest Best Picture Winner In History
1939’s Gone With The Wind currently holds the record for being the longest Best Picture winner at a staggering three hours and 44 minutes. If nominated, Killers of the Flower Moon would come close to matching this runtime thanks to the Martin Scorsese epic’s duration of three hours and 26 minutes, but no other Best Picture contender comes close to matching Gone With The Wind's record. Killers of the Flower Moon's unwieldy runtime was the source of some criticism upon the movie’s release, and this could put a dent in its Oscars hopes, especially as it goes head-to-head with the slightly less bladder-testing Oppenheimer.
Oscars nominations will be announced on January 23.
Gone With The Wind has faced decades of retrospective reviews questioning its merits, but the movie’s massive runtime is more than justified by the sheer breadth of its story. Although both Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon are also three-hour-plus period pieces, both movies cast a more critical eye on their subjects and are told from more immersive, intimate perspectives. Nevertheless, neither can hold a candle to Gone With The Wind's huge size, ensuring its Best Picture record is safe for at least another year.
Why Gone With The Wind's Oscars Record Is Unlikely To Be Broken
The sweeping grandeur of Gone With The Wind’s melodramatic epic style has fallen out of fashion, as evidenced by the mixed reviews Napoleon received upon release. As such, few four-hour movies are even green-lit by studios in the 2020s, let alone released in theaters and made available for Oscars contention. Gone With The Wind comes from an era where theater habits were very different. Movies had intermissions, patrons would routinely enter halfway through screenings, and double-features were growing in popularity. Nowadays, nobody wants to spend that long at the cinema.
Many filmmakers who want to tell long-form stories are now encouraged to bring those projects to the small screen. The phenomenon of prestige TV has resulted in TV shows gaining as much popularity and acclaim as many major movie releases, meaning a modern project with the scope and scale of Gone With The Wind likely wouldn’t compete at the Oscars. As such, the chances of any future Best Picture breaking its runtime record is highly unlikely.
