Costume Drama’s have always been 3 hours plus. Bollywood’s last period film Jodha Akbar directed by Ashutosh Gowariker had a runtime in excess of 3 and a half hours.
Veer, director Anil Sharma promises, will break the trend. The film’s final runtime is expected to be less than 180 mins (3 hours).
Talking to Taran Adarsh of Bollywood Hungama, Sharma says “The final length of the film is 3.04 hours, which includes the opening and end titles. And I plan to bring it further down to 2.50 hours. The length of the film never shot up to 3.30 hours. Even when I watched the loose edit, it was barely a few minutes more than the final length. But, as I said, I plan to limit the running time to less than 3 hours.”
Anil Sharma directed Gadar was exactly 2 hours 57 minutes in runtime, a numerologist would probably suggest the director to trim Veer down to exactly the same to repeat the success of the yesteryear blockbuster. What say?
But runtime doesn’t really matter for good films, Hollywood’s recent release Avatar was 3 hours plus and the Oscar nominated Lagaan too was close to 4 hours in runtime.