“The early word on ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button‘: again, David Fincher has handed in a movie to Paramount that is quite long,” says Anne Thompson who notes that the exorbitant length of “Zodiac” (god, what a fucking snooze that was) hurt that film and Paramount.
“This film is polished to a fine sheen, I understand. The word from one viewer: ‘shiny.’ “
According to an early review at AICN, the film is three hours long and the length is an issue. “Third act repetition” is apartly a significant problem for the film so don’t be surprised in a few weeks if you hear it’s been forced to make cuts. Or at least keep an eye out for developing news. Obviously the studio wants this to be Oscar fodder, but length can always be a tricky issue for audiences and Academy voters.
Lord knows “Zodiac” was waaaay longer than it needed to be. Slashfilm agrees with our assessment and says there’s a bigger story going on behind the scenes that most journalists don’t want to talk about. That sounds about right. Meanwhile they point to a new ‘Button’ T.V spot that aired during the Olympics that’s on Trailer addict, but it’s shot off the screen and terrible quality just FYI.