Despite the fact that a significant number of them would probably never see Transformers: The Last Knight anyway, a bunch of people yesterday were horrified to discover that Michael Bay’s latest robot smash-fest would apparently be over three hours long. It’s unclear where that rumor began, but if you run a Google search for the movie title and “runtime,” it still lists it as three hours and two minutes—which, even for fans of these movies, would be interminable.
Naturally, everybody freaked out that a movie they had no intention of seeing would be extremely long, but it turns out that there was nothing to worry about. Bay himself has gone on Twitter to set the record straight, revealing that The Last Knight is actually “shorter than the last 3 movies by a lot.”
Now, unless Bay has forgotten that there have actually been four movies in this series, that seems like an oddly specific metric to judge this movie by. /Film has done the math, looking at the running time for each Transformers movie, and based on that scientific study it has determined that The Last Knight will actually be longer than two hours and 24 minutes but shorter than two hours and 30 minutes. Compared to three hours, that’s practically nothing.