
Cillian Murphy in a scene from the three-hour “Oppenheimer.” Universal Pictures via AP
Hollywood is waging war on our excretory systems – and it’s winning.
We live in a time of lengthy blockbusters: “The Batman” (176 minutes), “Oppenheimer” (180 minutes), “Avengers: Endgame” (182 minutes!), “The Irishman” (a whopping 209 minutes!), anything Peter Jackson makes. But we do not live in a time of intermissions.
Do Martin Scorsese and Christopher Nolan want us to develop urinary tract infections?
“If I can speak for my bladder, I’m grateful for intermissions,” film critic and historian Leonard Maltin says.
Once, Hollywood’s grandest productions knew when to give us a breather – “Ben-Hur,” “Gone With the Wind,” all the way up to “Gandhi” in 1982. A year later came the 192-minute aerospace epic “The Right Stuff.” It had no intermission – but then again, there are no bathroom breaks in space. (It was so absurdly long that HBO later broke its promise of showing uncut, uninterrupted movies by adding its own intermission to “The Right Stuff” – to protect the viewers’ sanity and sanitation.)
“Filmmakers and studios and theater owners alike got out of the habit,” Maltin says. “Once that tradition was disrupted, nobody wanted to go back.”
Things got so bad that software developer Dan Gardner created an app called RunPee after gritting his teeth through Jackson’s 2005 remake of “King Kong” (187 minutes). The app tells you when to start its built-in timer (usually during the fading of a production logo) and it notifies you about the best times to take a quick break. (In the case of “King Kong”? Two hours and two minutes into the movie, during the silly part with gigantic bugs.)
“It was a problem,” Gardner says, “and business is about solving a problem.”
2024 sure looked like another problem year at the movies, from “Megalopolis” (138 minutes) to “A Complete Unknown” (140 minutes) to “Wicked” (160 minutes).
But then came “The Brutalist,” a movie with a 215-minute run time and – mercy – an intermission.
Life is an intermission. Why not movies?
Step outside the cineplex and you’ll find almost nothing but intermissions. Intermittent fasting is merely eating with intermissions. Sleep? A nightly intermission. Red lights? A road intermission. The Biden administration? Also an intermission, it turned out.

Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner in “Avengers: Endgame.” Marvel Studios
Hell, life itself is a one long intermission from the inky blackness of nonbeing.
So why don’t we have them in movies anymore?
They used to have to break up films out of necessity. Projectionists needed the pause to swap out film reels, which became unnecessary as projectors improved and is almost laughably quaint in our digital age. Plus now, in theory and maybe in practice, movie theaters want you in and out as quickly as possible, so they can jam as many screenings into a day as possible – already a challenge when movies are racing past the three-hour mark.
But …
“I really wish movies still had intermissions,” says Peter Coffey, a 32-year-old advertising professional in Chicago. He lists his reasons: a bathroom break. A concession stand run. A moment to reflect on the movie. A chance to chat with other moviegoers.
“You’re out the house. You’re at the theater. Why rush the experience?” he says. “I think it would turn the theatergoing experience into a journey, like when you go to see a play.”
If that sounds old-fashioned, well, so is “The Brutalist.” Director Brady Corbet’s drama, which he co-wrote with his partner Mona Fastvold, follows Hungarian-born Jewish architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) who immigrates to the United States after surviving the Holocaust.
The film was shot on 35mm film, has a grainy, mid-century quality and even plops a period-appropriate mustache on the upper lip of Guy Pearce. The two halves of the film feel separate and the intermission fits right in.

From left, JaNae Collins, Lily Gladstone, and Cara Jade Myers in a scene from “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Melinda Sue Gordon/Apple TV+ via AP
It’s been getting press, the same way the intermission in some screenings of Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight” did in 2015. And the same way the lack of intermission in Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” did in 2023, when some theaters went rogue and added one anyway – to the chagrin of the studios.
The intermission in “The Brutalist” has “gotten more attention in a way than we expected it to,” Corbet told Indiewire. “I personally have a hard time sitting still for three-and-a-half hours, so I needed it.” Was there more to it? Was it more of an artistic or physiological decision? We wanted to ask Corbet ourselves, but he couldn’t take a personal intermission from his own life to tell us.
But Corbet’s choice isn’t entirely out of step with contemporary filmmaking – if you take a global view. Unlike Hollywood, Bollywood isn’t afraid of a break. In fact, many Indian movies – often epic in length and musical in nature – are narratively structured around an intermission, similar to how old sitcoms were constructed around commercial breaks, says TV and film critic Shah Shahid.
Sometimes, those leisurely intermissions can stretch out for more than 45 minutes.
At “The Brutalist,” Shahid says, “my Western and non-South Asian colleagues were saying, ‘This intermission was really refreshing.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah. Yeah.’ I grew up with these long Indian movies. You needed a break. Just for your brain to pause for a second.”
A shared experience
George Stevens Jr., 92, has some experience with intermissions. His father planned one for his epic 1956 western “Giant” but ultimately decided to cut it. To this day, the younger Stevens says, the movie “plays beautifully without an intermission. People are ready for that experience.”

Adrien Brody, left, and Guy Pearce in a scene from “The Brutalist.” Lol Crawley/A24 via AP
So Stevens was wary of the one in “The Brutalist” when he and his wife, Liz, went to see it recently at the Georgetown AMC in Washington. Back in the day, you’d see a movie “in a nice theater. There’d be a break. People would talk and get refreshments and come back in,” he says. Hanging around the lobby of the AMC “on a cold winter day was not very inviting.”
Stevens is not like you and me. He founded the American Film Institute, created the AFI Life Achievement Award and cocreated the Kennedy Center Honors.
He’s pretty much earned the right to bail, and he’s got Academy screeners.
So when the lights went up halfway through “The Brutalist,” they went home, lit a fire and watched the second part on their home screen.
“It was a perfect solution,” he says.
But for the screener-less masses?
At a matinee showing of “The Brutalist,” stretching from early afternoon to evening at that same AMC, the mostly older crowd didn’t go home. They didn’t go anywhere, certainly not the musty hallway carpeted with yesteryear’s popcorn grease. Most just … sat … and fiddled on their phones or loudly whispered about the movie. And what to have for dinner.
At a screening in the Williamsburg neighborhood in Brooklyn, moviegoers debated whether they’d have time to rush home and make a sandwich, presumably cold cuts. There would at least be time to grab a bodega beer and smuggle it back in the theater inside a coat.
Meanwhile, the line for the women’s bathroom was 20 people deep, highlighting the importance of seat selection during a film with an intermission.
But at a Los Angeles screening, the audience gathered in the lobby and discussed the first half. They refilled their soft drinks and commented on the intermission.
These strangers spoke with one another, maybe because the wildfires had them yearning for connection, maybe because it’s a movie town, maybe because it was a novel experience or maybe it was just a chatty crowd.
Whatever the case, “There was this communal aspect to it that you don’t usually get to experience when you go to a movie theater,” says animation writer/producer Michael Vogel, who compared the experience to seeing a Broadway show. “It sounds so cheesy to say, but it made it feel more special. It made it feel like more of an experience.”
When the movie ended, before going to bed, Vogel tweeted: “Saw #TheBrutalist and honestly, an intermission in a movie is the best thing ever. I peed, I stretched my legs, I got more Cherry Coke, I chatted with complete strangers about the first half of the movie. We should do this more often.”
The reaction surprised him. “I find it hilarious, the things that go viral,” he says. “I sent the tweet and was like, ‘Big deal.’ Then I woke up and was like, ‘What the hell happened?’ I did not think this would be a thing that gets people going.”
But, let’s be honest. Americans need rest.
We work too long. We move too fast. We consume too much.
We do too often.
Almost everyone needs a break.
“Intermissions should become a staple again,” 25-year-old North Carolina-based moviegoer Aaron Ford says. “One reason people don’t go to the movies is because they like the comfort of their own home. They’re willing to sacrifice of the grandeur of a theater experience to sit home and pause and do what they need to do. I think adding intermissions would bring more people to the theaters.”
And, maybe, Tinseltown is listening.
“Hollywood is known for copying,” says Maltin. “Trends sprout up and multiply. I can only hope that the fact that people are remarking upon this instance will get a louder buzz going.”
For most, it would be a welcome change. For Gardner, the guy who has dedicated the past 17 years to pinpointing the best sequences of a movie better spent at the urinal or on a toilet?
“For business purposes,” he says, “I’m not a fan.”
– – –
Jada Yuan contributed to this report.
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