Well, you asked for it, you got it! Back in September, when we first started hearing reports that Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street might not make its November release date, the main reason given was that Scorsese’s first cut of the movie was approximately three hours in length and needed to be significantly reduced. At the time, a lot of fans didn’t quite understand why the movie needed to be trimmed, calling for the full three-hour cut to be released as is. Universal ultimately gave Scorsese more time to re-edit the film and rescheduled the movie for Christmas Day, but now we’re being told that the final movie will still be three hours long. So did he actually make any major cuts or did the studio simply give him more leeway on the running time?

According to Variety, The Wolf of Wall Street will clock in at 2 hours and 59 minutes, making it the longest movie in Scorsese’s career (Casino was 2:58). That also makes it even longer than Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, which is listed at 2 hours and 40 minutes. Clearly audiences are going to be doing some marathon movie watching in theatres this holiday season, although at this point, that’s really nothing new.

THR reported a couple of days ago that Scorsese’s original cut of the movie was “well north of three hours” so it would seem that there was definitely more than a few minutes that needed to be excised. However, probably the most important part of the re-edit was removing some nudity and sex scenes in order to avoid being slapped with an NC-17. Producer Terrence Winter promised that it is still “a very fast movie” and did not seem concerned that the excessive running time would scare audiences away. What do you think, are there too many long movies being released around Christmas as of late? Does this news make you more or less excited to see The Wolf of Wall Street?