It’s certainly the shortest of the DC Extended Universe films, to date. This seems bizarre, considering the movie in question. Justice League is a large movie featuring an ensemble cast and a likely very high number of action set pieces. One would expect the movie to be that much longer, right? Especially considering that, unlike over in the MCU, the DC Extended Universe is essentially starting with its team movie. With the exception of Superman and Wonder Woman, other members of the cast still don’t have standalone movies. Surprisingly, even Batman doesn’t yet have one. So the natural assumption is that the movie would be longer to make up for that lacking familiarity. In fact, it’s the opposite. At only 121-minutes, Justice League is actually a whopping 20-minutes shorter than 2012’s The Avengers.
Some might want to point fingers at the one DCEU flick that some people seem content to forget – Suicide Squad. And yes, that movie is fairly short. In fact, many at least praise it for not feeling any longer than it is. But no. Suicide Squad clocks in at 123-minutes, a whole two minutes longer. This is all compared to Man of Steel’s gargantuan 143-minute runtime and Wonder Woman‘s 141-minutes. And it’s a far cry from Batman vs Superman‘s 151-minutes.
It could be argued that the movie is only serving to introduce the characters, and it’ll spend far more time on the action, on the plot, on the superhero shenanigans people expect. Because it isn’t trying to build on or play off of prior movies, it won’t dedicate as much screentime to that aspect. People have, in the past, complained about the bloated runtime of DC’s films. They have claimed that many of the artsier things could be cut for the sake of attention spans. It could have been decided to address these complaints with Joss Whedon’s takeover of the project, seeing as the two do have very different directorial styles.
The Justice League unites on November 17.
