Why Intermissions Should Return

Back in the olden days, when big-scale movies ran at least two and a half hours long, they would usually come with an intermission, not just to provide a steady pace for the film in each half but also because it tied into how films were shown when they were using reel-to-reel film.

For instance, let’s look at plays or musicals; the entire production would typically be split into two acts. When Act One wrapped up, it not only gave the audience a chance to roam about, stretch their legs, use the bathroom, or even refill on concessions if they needed to, but it also gave the performers and crew a chance to take a break and reenergize themselves before giving it their all in Act Two of the production.

You would think it would not be necessary with movies because we’re watching nothing but visual recreations of actors as characters in different scenarios, right?

Well, the way it worked was that in the 20th century, movies were shown by strapping several film reels together in a projector to display the movie on the big screen. Each film reel contained around two hours, meaning it would’ve been one reel per act. The first reel would’ve made up the movie’s first half, whereas the next one would’ve made up the last half. So, much like how the actors and actresses in a stage performance would’ve taken a break, as would have the audience as they were out doing their thing, this would’ve given the camera operators a chance to take reel one out and replace it with reel two and get that started by the time the audience returned to their seats. By then, they would’ve been ready to go with the last half and either all relieved or satisfied with more snacks to accompany them throughout that last half if they were still hungry. In addition, this would’ve benefited the theater because it’d generate revenue from concessions, not just ticket sales.

Again, this was a common practice for most films that ran a generally extensive length throughout most of the 20th century before it started dying down in the 1980s. Among the most noticeable of the last films to have used the intermission were Warren Beatty’s Reds, Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, and even Once Upon a Time in America, whether in its three-hour-and-40-minute cut or four-hour-and-10-minute cut. These films still used an intermission, whether it was placed halfway through or even near the end of the film’s middle portion.

Let’s look at it this way. Movies and stage productions started with an intermission. Then, the music, called an Entr’acte, was played to signal to the audience that the performance, or the movie, was about to resume its inevitable progression of the story. In movie theaters, this would have reminded its audience in equal measure that they had to retake their seats.

Think of this as the theatrical equivalent of “And now, back to our program.”

For general movie theaters to show the otherwise long movies, the studios would have had to trim the films to ensure that they were given the theatrical run they needed, while also fitting snugly into the screens and runtimes of the theaters’ choice. Meanwhile, in multiplexes or roadshow theaters, where the screens would have been more numerable and plenty, the movies could have run forth at their original intended runtime while having the added necessity of sneaking in the intermission to allow its audiences the benefit of both the ultimate cinematic viewing experience and a much-needed bathroom break and refreshments without any ongoing conflicts with other neighboring screens.

This was shown at the end of the trailer of The Hateful Eight when the it promoted exclusively the Roadshow showing

The latest movie released in the Roadshow format was The Hateful Eight, which Quentin Tarantino filmed and released using the original Panavision 70 cameras. As was the custom with every film released in a Roadshow format in the 20th century, The Hateful Eight was accompanied by a complementary booklet that provided greater detail about the movie. So far, however, all we have to choose from regarding The Hateful Eight is the original theatrical version and the four-part ‘Extended Version’ on Netflix. Who knows when, or if, the movie’s Roadshow version, complete with the intermission, will ever see the light of day again and be evaluated for how Tarantino intended to present it in Roadshow screenings?

The primary reason intermissions died down in the late 20th century may have been due to reports of people who attended only the first half of the movie, only to walk out and leave the theater during the intermission. So, they essentially sat through only part of the entire film without bothering to watch it from beginning to end.

And to those who wonder if I know anything about the bladder control itself and whether it’s any different now from how it was fifty or a hundred years ago…

Damn it, man, I’m a critic, not a urologist!

The closest thing to an intermission we have today at the movies can be found in double features. Whenever one movie ended, the break between films, depending on their length, would have allowed moviegoers to use the bathroom, stock up on refreshments, and prepare themselves for the next and final movie in the pairing. One of the most recent examples of this was the release of Toy Story and Toy Story 2 in 3D, which was used to promote the then-forthcoming release of Toy Story 3. Of course, even without the double feature, I can imagine people using the bathroom and stocking up on refreshments if they’re finishing one movie and preparing to watch another.

In addition, one of the most controversial double features I can think of was primarily due to its accidental surprise factor, which occurred in 2017 when Disney released the Pixar film Coco and bundled it with the twenty-minute animated featurette, Olaf’s Frozen Adventure. As I mentioned in my review of that featurette, I thought the biggest culprit was insufficient marketing to promote Olaf’s Frozen Adventure in conjunction with Coco. As a result, this led to controversy surrounding the featurette’s pairing with Coco, with moviegoers complaining that they had received more than they bargained for and that the featurette’s inclusion alongside Coco felt most inappropriate. On the contrary, the promotional material for Olaf’s Frozen Adventure did acknowledge its attachment to Coco during its theatrical showing. That’s why it pays to have good marketing.

Take a look at all four posters here and tell me which one forgot to acknowledge its theatrical partner.

Of course, the problem would not have had anything to do with the technical details of the movies. Sometimes, the problem can be easily found in the movies themselves.

One of the most infamous examples of such monolithic filmmaking, Cleopatra, suffered from extensive production problems and was criticized by many for its generally uneven biographical narrative concerning Cleopatra and her legacy. It ran for over four hours, including the intermission, and cost its studio, 20th Century Fox, a tremendous fortune. It was such an expensive project that when it came out in 1963 and bombed, 20th Century Fox became wary of crafting epic films until it struck gold with George Lucas’ Star Wars in 1977.

Allowing the movies to run for a long time provides creative opportunities. Movies like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, The Hunger Games: Mockingbird, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, the Reckoning films of Mission Impossible, and just recently, Dune and Wicked, all began production as a pair of feature-length films, both of which meant to function as Parts One and Two of a complete story meant for the big screen. Only in this case, while some parts were treated as ‘parts’, the parts were nonetheless treated as individual movies, more likely because the creators, cast, and crew needed as much time as each separate movie would’ve allowed them to implement every story beat and element that would’ve mattered the most in the long run. Because of this, the time between the movies during their release, no matter how lengthy, was treated as another example of an intermission.

Over the past four decades, there have been many instances where movie directors and producers released films that exceeded three hours without an intermission. I can think of plenty of movies that ran for such an extended length of time and still did their job splendidly without needing an intermission. Just look at Titanic, Schindler’s List, all three Lord of the Rings movies, and so on.

And how about recent movies like Oppenheimer and Avengers: Endgame. It’s debatable whether movies like these two need an intermission. The necessity of an intermission for movies at least three hours long would depend on how continuous each film’s story is and whether breaking it up would disrupt the movie’s overall flow.

However, some three-hour movie releases nowadays have been subject to complaints for going on for that length without an intermission. It would have made some moviegoers uneasy, as they struggled to sit for three to four hours straight to watch the whole movie from beginning to end without missing anything.

Among the biggest and guiltiest examples are Martin Scorsese’s latest two films, The Irishman and Killers of the Flower Moon. Both are phenomenal films in their own right, but many people complained about the length of each movie and how burdensome it was to sit through all three and a half hours without a chance to take a break or use the restroom before watching the second half.

Recently, director Brady Corbet shook things up when he released The Brutalist, the story of László, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor who immigrated to Philadelphia with little more than his expertise in architecture. The rest of his family followed shortly after, but that’s beside the point. Outside of it being a phenomenal, seamlessly made film, it also had the added opportunity to be interlaced with an intermission in the middle of the picture that lasted for 15 minutes, and that was just the right amount of time necessary to give the audience a chance to take a break, relieve themselves, possibly help themselves to second helpings of concessions if they needed to. And wouldn’t you know it? Beyond its fitting into the mid-20th-century aesthetic of the movie, many people have heralded this as a much-needed return of what was thought to be lost in the art of cinema. So, do I believe that more movies, if they went either above three hours or, if they wanted to push the envelope, extended it to around four and a half hours, then that might be reason enough to give the movie an intermission, which I consider most ideal for a movie of this length.

My girlfriend and I went to see The Brutalist when it was still in theaters, and we were lucky to have seen the movie unfold precisely as it was meant to, with the intermission intact. And when the intermission screen came on, we let out a massive sigh of relief, for that meant it was time for us to use the bathroom and relieve ourselves as we prepared for the last half. Of course, a good chunk of the intermission was about staring at the family portrait from László’s side of the family, which generally seemed like a good opportunity to discuss what had occurred throughout the first half of the movie, as we became eagerly excited to see what would have happened in the last half of The Brutalist.

Now, the cast and crew of The Brutalist had good points about whether this would’ve affected the pacing of the movie and the collective audience’s intrigue in the film as it progressed. But I still say that long movies need this back.

Similarly, the same can be said about episodes of a streaming series. Many of these shows have episodes that led directly into the next and functioned almost like book chapters. Hopping back to the two-part movies, imagine Parts One and Two as equivalent to watching two extremely long episodes in a row that tied directly into each other.

When movies in theaters still had intermissions, television emerged as a more prominent medium in the 1950s. More likely than not, it did not have as many commercials as television would eventually have in the following decades. Nowadays, it’s a little hard to tell which television programs even have commercials, unless you compare them between broadcast and streaming networks.

The closest thing to a commercial that would have played forth in the intermissions was the classic jingle that I can sum up in six words: Let’s All Go to the Lobby.

I would be okay if this original jingle returned for nostalgia’s sake. But considering how attuned I am to animation nowadays, imagine the possibilities that could be gained if an animated remake of this were to be made. I would wager that it needs to be zestier, more fanciful, tempting, bouncy, and upbeat if it wants to invite its audience to give themselves second helpings of the refreshments they love so much.

Which means, more dinero for the theater owners! Cha-ching!

Additionally, theaters and television are now at a stage where each can operate independently without the need for commercials. Streaming networks – you name it, Netflix, Apple TV+, Disney+, Hulu, Paramount+, HBO Max, Peacock, the list goes on – can play whatever movies or TV shows you want without the bother of commercials to intermingle with whatever program you’re watching. With streaming networks, whenever you feel compelled to use the bathroom or get second helpings on refreshments, that’s easy. You just push pause and do your thing. With movie theaters, that’s not so easy. If you have to hold your bladder for at least half an hour out of commitment to watch the whole movie from beginning to end and miss nothing, you’d risk getting a damaged bladder or who knows what just because you’d have had to hold your bladder for such a long period of time. With intermissions, which, from recent experience, I’m now compelled to call ‘cinematic commercial breaks’, the audience would be given a chance to ‘go to the lobby,’ use the bathroom, and do whatever to prepare themselves the right way for the last half of what they had left to watch.

Even binge-watchers know when to take a break from all the action and relieve themselves sometime. The same thing should be said about theatergoers.

In fact, we know how the trailers for upcoming movies always play at the beginning of the film, where they show what movies are coming up. Well, ask me this: what would happen if the theater owners took advantage of the intermission, besides potentially resurrecting the ‘Let’s All Go to the Lobby’ commercial, to release even more trailers for upcoming movies? Granted, nobody needs to stick around for them if they don’t feel compelled to, but imagine how much more future revenue would be left slinking into the theater owners’ pockets with these bad boys exciting audiences during the middle of the movie they’re watching.

The Lord of the Rings’ theatrical cuts tell a more streamlined story in each movie, with nary a break in the middle, as the cinematic narrative chugged right along as desired for a trilogy of three-hour-long films. However, when you look at each film’s extended cuts, all of which run at least three and a half hours long, they have not always been presented as a single, continuous viewing experience. In most cases, especially in home video, each film has been split into two halves. And you know what else makes this move structurally and narratively sound? The original stories these movies were based on, the three books of The Lord of the Rings, were each split into two. Books I and II applied to The Fellowship of the Ring, as Books III and IV did for The Two Towers, and Books V and VI for The Return of the King. J.R.R. Tolkien’s intentions with them were to signify a break in the story, similar to how their chapters broke the story into more digestible outcomes. Imagine what would have happened if ‘The Lord of the Rings’ films were released into theaters in their extended cuts, which maintained almost everything from the classic novels, with the middle of each film being split up to include the intermission? Think how much of a cinematic viewing experience The Lord of the Rings would have been by then!

So, the intermission can work not just logically or for the audience; it can also work in the movie’s favor, too, and even tie back to how stories with an obvious break in the middle, whether in literature, theater, or even movies, can be expressed.

And here’s the big clincher: the other reason the intermission is so essential is that India is one country that still allows intermissions in movie theaters.

While showing movies with an intermission in America was rare, the opposite is true in India: almost no movie was shown in theaters without an intermission, whether it was Bollywood blockbusters or even foreign films. Part of the reason for this was that India acknowledged the substantial revenue to be generated from their concessions, not just movie ticket sales, and thus kept the intermission going as if it were nothing.

Cinematic intermissions here in America, though? They desperately need some resuscitation, and movies like The Brutalist hopefully got the ball rolling on their return in our country.

As a matter of fact, because Christopher Nolan‘s next film, The Odyssey, is set to come out next July – as of this writing – it’s bound to potentially be as faithful a take on The Odyssey as can be. What are the odds that it will need as much runtime as Oppenheimer did to tell as much story of the Odyssey as Nolan envisioned? Who knows? Depending on the story and the length of time necessary for Nolan to tell his take on The Odyssey, maybe this one will follow The Brutalist’s lead and sneak in an intermission. Could it run as long as Oppenheimer, at three hours, or would it require gargantuan measures with the classic story and a four-and-a-half-hour runtime to capture its epicness? Maybe The Odyssey could become the next film to set a stage in revitalizing the necessity of intermissions in modern cinema.

But on my part, that’s just a wild guess. Maybe a more challenging movie will emerge in the future, continue what The Brutalist started, and bring the intermission back where it’s appropriate so that it will reignite what has been disregarded over the past few decades.

Whenever we go see a play or a musical, have you seen any of them toss aside their intermissions to keep the action going? No. The intermission allows both the audience and the production participants to refresh themselves before returning to what they had left of the experience, and the experience is still felt.

If stage productions held onto intermissions into the present and still amounted to something magical, why not the movies, too?

Until then, let’s keep hoping that the most cherished and arguably necessary part of old-style cinema will make a comeback and give us permission for a quick mid-experience breather.

Works Cited

Sharma, Garima. "Do We Need the Intermission?" Times of India, 21 Jan. 2011, timesofindia.indiatimes.com/entertainment/hindi/bollywood/news/Do-we-need-the-intermission/articleshow/7326530.cms.

Yahoo UK. (2025, January 23). Should more movies have intermissions? The Brutalist cast weigh in #thebrutalist #intermission. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwhj1QG7Aqw