Will ‘Thor: Ragnarok’ Be the Shortest MCU Movie to Date?

If there's one thing that's fairly consistent across the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe, it's that the movies are long. Most of them run right around two hours, which is more or less the standard in this day and age, but a lot of them have begun creeping closer and closer to two and a half hours. This makes the news that Thor: Ragnarok is shaping up to be the shortest film in the entire MCU a welcome breath of fresh air. 

While speaking with Collider, director Taika Waititi surprised us all by saying that the third Thor film will reverse the MCU trend of films getting longer with each successive entry. 

“The cut right now, I reckon it’s about 100 minutes. It’s not gonna be a very, very long film. I think that stories are better when you leave them wanting more, and this film moves at a clip, it’s got stuff happening all the time. I think people are still gonna feel exhausted by the end, they’ve been on this big journey and stuff, so I don’t think we need the film to be three hours.”

As of now, Thor: The Dark World and The Incredible Hulk are the shortest MCU films, both running 112 minutes. The longest MCU film is Captain America: Civil War which ran 147 minutes,  though Avengers: Infinity War co-director Joe Russo confirmed in a separate interview with Collider that the third Avengers film would be the longest MCU film by far.

“The current cut is over two and a half [hours]… Most of it’s a movie you could show, but there’s still a lot of work left to be done, I still have a couple of scenes that we haven’t finished from Avengers 3 that I’m shooting in the next few months with my brother, and it’s certainly gonna be a film that lives in the two and a half hour, two and a half hour-plus range.”

Elaborating further, Russo reminded us that this film is the culmination of ten years and nearly twenty films worth of story lines, so it only makes sense that Infinity War would be the longest film in the MCU. I guess it's understandable, I just don't want to reach a point where I've gotta start wearing adult diapers to fully enjoy these movies. Thank goodness for Ragnarok's short running time, though. Silver linings, folks. You gotta look for 'em.