Parenting & Family Quote by John Badham

Badham isn’t confessing to impatience so much as admitting the quiet tyranny of format. “Length purposes” sounds technical, almost apologetic, but it’s a loaded euphemism: runtime isn’t just an artistic choice, it’s a negotiation with distributors, theater schedules, and the unspoken rule that family entertainment must move like a sugar rush. By invoking “the attention span of kids,” he shields the cut with a familiar cultural scapegoat. It’s not that the filmmaker lacked vision; it’s that the audience - a supposedly restless, easily bored youth - forced his hand.

That move does two things. First, it reframes editing as caretaking. Badham positions himself as a pragmatic storyteller, protecting momentum and comprehension, not merely trimming fat. Second, it reveals how “kids” function as a market category more than a human one. Children become a stopwatch: an external metric used to justify decisions that may actually be about pacing, ticket turnover, or the studio’s confidence in repeat viewings.

The specificity of “about 90 minutes” is telling. It’s not an aesthetic principle, it’s an industry convention, the standard container for broad-audience movies that need to feel substantial without asking too much. The subtext is a little mournful: there were “scenes” - plural - that might have deepened character or mood, but the modern entertainment economy rewards velocity over texture. Badham’s line captures a director translating art into a product spec, then trying to make that compromise sound like compassion.