You may want to make sure your bladder is well emptied and that you have a comfy seat when checking out director Denis Villeneuve’s upcoming sci-fi film, Blade Runner 2049, because according to Sony’s Russian site, the film will be quite the lengthy one (via IndieWire).

Supposedly running at 163 minutes, Blade Runner 2049 will manage to be substantially longer than its 117-minute predecessor. Though while it’s definitely a lot longer than that film, it’s also a hell of a lot longer than most blockbusters in recent memory. For example, the already-long movies Batman v Superman and Captain America: Civil War come in at 151 minutes and 147 minutes, respectively, and the recent War for the Planet of the Apes was also only 140 minutes long. The only films that we can think we can think of in recent memory that compare on the same scale as Blade Runner 2049 are Interstellar (169 minutes) and the Hobbit movies, which run at 169 minutes, 161 minutes, and 144 minutes, respectively (and these are just the theatrical cuts).

So the big question now is whether or not this film warrants such a long runtime. If we look at the original Blade Runner, it was a film that survived on a very short script (the characters seemed like they never spoke), its thick atmosphere, and its clever ideas. If the recent short that dropped is any indication of what we’re getting in this sequel, it seems like they’ll be taking the last two aspects of that first film and blowing them up exponentially. Rather than getting a thinly-plotted meditation, we may very well be getting a more dense and complex narrative than we were expecting.

Is this a bad thing? Not necessarily. Director Denis Villeneuve has already proven with Arrival that he can weave in complex ideas into smart sci-fi, but I can understand die-hard Blade Runner fans who think that such a move would only betray the integrity of the original. Sadly, we won’t have much to say on that until we see the movie ourselves, but it does get us thinking.

What do you think? Is 163 minutes too long for Blade Runner 2049? Let us know your thoughts down below!

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SOURCE: IndieWire