✔️ 2022-04-06 17:25:17 – Paris/France.
It's getting harder and harder for us to sit on the couch to enjoy a long movie. When we say long, we refer to a woman of cinema in the style of Laurence of Arabia ou ninety. Three or four hours between chest and back on a weekday does not seem like an easy path for many viewers, almost more accustomed to watching series on platforms such as Netflix, HBO or Disney +. One only has to go to forums like Reddit or Quora to read comments like, "Why is it so hard for me to watch long movies?" or "Why am I not concentrating when watching movies?" The reasons are many and varied, and mainly relate to a change in the attention span of viewers.
Well, Netflix's response was none other than to create a list of movies that are less than an hour and a half long: the "Short-Ass" section.
We owe everything to Saturday Night Live. Yes, Netflix actually added this category in response to Pete Davidson's Saturday Night Live song about movies under an hour and 30 minutes. Netflix tweeted the SNL rap adding "good idea". Immediately after, he created his new section of films organized by genre which last at least an hour and a half and a maximum of an hour and 40 minutes.
good idea https://t.co/PIIix3MZUK https://t.co/lyJmpuGBko
— Netflix Is A Joke (@NetflixIsAJoke) April 4, 2022
What can we find? Some titles you don't like they'll be stuck on the couch for hours, like Zoolander, a funeral, The Knights of the Square Table and their court bishops ou Minuit à Paris. Interestingly, Netflix didn't include Davidson's selections in his rap song, because Miss Daisy Walk et The Lion King. However, what the category includes are movies like The dictator, horror movieet, Obsession ou A peaceful place. All about an hour and a half.
Movies are getting shorter and simpler. There is a general consensus within the screenwriters guild that the typical scene in a movie is getting shorter and shorter. While scenes 50 years ago could average 3 or 4 pages, in the late 1980s the general rule was 2 pages. Today, the average scene is a page or half a page.
Likewise, it feels like what worked as the end point of the first act's plot is now more likely to happen in the middle of the first act. The same seems to work with the number of pages. A quarter of a century ago, a normal screenplay could be 120 pages. Nowadays they are usually 105 as the ideal length.
What do you mean by shorten. When you think about this phenomenon of "shortening" movies, there's really nothing more than anecdotal evidence. Take the example of Karate Kid, its original version from 1984. We notice that Miyagi does not officially start training Daniel until about halfway through the story, and we realize that this will never happen in a contemporary movie. People are smarter. They need less context. They want to take action faster. Like on social media: faster, faster, faster.
Why do we have trouble sitting down to watch long movies? The reason behind this is probably our attention span. We start watching a movie on the computer or TV and start watching mobile or re-watching anything on the iPad. And the worst part is that when you do that, you don't stop the film. This may be based on gaze theory, which explains that the audience (in the cinema) is focused on the big screen in front of them and the only other thing they can focus on is their popcorn, but in reality, they constantly watch the movie. On the contrary, there is the way we watch television at home. In your living room, bedroom, kitchen, or anywhere, there are too many distractions.
Attention span decreases. Recently, a study published by the Technical University of Denmark suggests that the overall collective attention span decreases due to the amount of information presented to the audience. Research shows that people now have more things to focus on and get them done in less time. To reach these conclusions, they analyzed the last 40 years of movie ticket sales, Google Books, Twitter data, Google trends, Reddit and Wikipedia.
It's not TikTok's fault. The idea that watching lots of fast-paced videos trains your brain to react to shorter and shorter content isn't so far-fetched. But several experts explain that this is not the case. When you scroll through TikTok, your brain gets a dose of dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter released by the brain's reward system and produces feelings of pleasure and motivates you to find more. "When you see something you don't like, you quickly switch to something that produces more dopamine," explained neuropsychologist Sanam Hafeez.
Like Instagram, Snapchat, or Twitter, TikTok isn't designed to encourage long attention spans. But the adult brain is less sensitive to changes in its attention span than the teenage brain, so hours of TikToks might not change the way you focus in the long run.
SOURCE: Reviews News
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