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Dhurandhar shows audiences haven’t lost patience—four-hour movies are back

Dhurandhar and its sequel, releasing tomorrow, stretches across two parts with a combined runtime pushing nearly eight hours, but the audience is here for it.

In these attention-deficit times, Aditya Dhar’s Dhurandhar breaks two mythologies. Don’t make long movies. And thriller action movies are supposed to move super fast. 

The Dhurandhar franchise flips the script on both these. 

The epic runtime is making a comeback in cinemas, but this time it is showing up in unexpected places. For decades, really long films belonged to mythological sagas, historical dramas, and sweeping period spectacles where kingdoms rise and fall, and messiah-like heroes stride across larger-than-life landscapes. But Dhurandhar and its sequel, releasing tomorrow, stretches across two parts with a combined runtime pushing nearly eight hours, but the audience is here for it.

This breaks one of the genre’s oldest rules. Thrillers are supposed to move fast. From the Mission Impossible franchise to the James Bond films, spy stories are built on speed, chases, ticking clocks, and last-minute betrayals. The storytelling is designed to sprint. But Dhurandhar seems determined to take its time.

There is no great mystery about its premise either. The trailers made it clear from the start that Ranveer Singh plays an Indian spy operating in the dangerous covert underworld of Pakistan. But the intrigue lies in the........

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