Only an idiot would be arrogant enough to expect good news about the Justice League movie at this point. Wonder Woman aside, the film has been exclusively foreshadowed by about a million hours of dreary, desaturated scenes of tortured men howling at drizzle in slow motion. The sort of person who gets excited about the Justice League movie is the sort of person who dresses in tinfoil and gets excited about lightning.

However, good news is indeed here: the Justice League movie will be 121 minutes long. Two hours and one minute and you’re done. Compare that to the 2hr 17min of Suicide Squad, or the 2hr 21min of Wonder Woman, or the 2hr 23min of Man of Steel, or the bone-crushing 2hr 31min of Batman v Superman, with all its portentous “Mankind is introduced to the Superman” chapter cards, and it’s clear that something has changed.

Surely Justice League should be much longer than this. Surely it has too many introductions to make, and too many moving pieces to put into place. And wasn’t there a thudding sense of inevitability when a three-hour running time was rumoured back in March? Didn’t that seem like a sensible length in which to accommodate all those portentous scenes of Batfleck roaring the word “Martha” at the moon like a wolf with a sore foot?

A two-hour anxiety attack … Dunkirk

Apparently not. Apparently a call came from on high, and from now on Warner Bros DC films will cut the flab and stick to a perky new all-killer-no-filler ethos. But this hasn’t happened in a vacuum. In fact, more and more films have adopted a brisker pace.

There was a time when, as far as film-making went, length equalled importance. The more respected you were as a director, the longer you wanted to hold everyone’s attention. Zack Snyder – a man who was calling himself “visionary” in the trailer for his second-ever film – is especially guilty of this. But then so is everyone else. Aside from 12 Angry Men, IMDb’s 20 best-rated films all clock in at two hours or more. The average running time for these films is 2hr 36min, a length of time almost long enough to allow you to fly to Morocco. But things are changing.

When Christopher Nolan’s war epic Dunkirk was announced, the consensus was that it’d be just as punishingly long as some of the director’s monolithic former efforts, such as The Dark Knight Rises (2hr 45min) or Interstellar (2hr 49min). When it was later announced that the film would come in at a neat two hours clean, it felt like a conscious course correction on Nolan’s part. In fact, it was more than that: the finished article felt like a sustained anxiety attack, which might have been diluted had it been drawn out any further.

Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here will detain you for a mere 85 minutes

The success of Moonlight at the Oscars (at 112 minutes, it’s the 14th shortest best-picture winner ever) and praise for the likes of Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird (93min) and Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here (85min) seem to suggest that critical appraisal has started to turn away from the bum-killers of old. Meanwhile, Ruben Östlund was forced to defend the 142-minute running time of his Palme d’Or winning The Square at Cannes, and the failure of Blade Runner 2049 at the box office was partly attributed to people not being willing to subject themselves to a 164-minute feat of endurance.

Of course, there might be financial reasons for this tightening of running times – in the current box-office slump, there’s an imperative to fit as many screenings in a cinema’s daily schedule as possible – but this seems to go beyond that. This seems to be a case of directors wanting to tell their story as efficiently as possible. And I for one am all for it.

Roger Ebert once said, “No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough”, but that might not cut it any longer. Perhaps from now on, we should work on the basis that all good films could probably shave off a decent 20 minutes and let us go home before we’re struck down by deep vein thrombosis. Wouldn’t that be nice?