Pop Smart - Watching the credits roll. And roll.

(Image courtesy 20th Century Fox)

Whenever I see a movie, particularly a Hollywood movie, I watch the closing credits through to the bitter end — the “bitter end” usually being the official MPAA rating logo before the lights come back up. I learned my lesson when I bailed on X-Men: The Last Stand about halfway through the closing credits, only to learn after the fact that there was a little “stinger” scene after they were finished. Frequently after the credits you might catch a final joke, a hint of a sequel or, with horror films, one last scare. The 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead uses the closing credits to such frightening effect, they actually make the whole movie better.

It can be disappointing to sit through at least five minutes of scrolling names for no payoff except seeing an unusual moniker. It’s getting more annoying, however, because some movie credits are dragging on longer than ever. Partly it’s a matter of having more people involved in films with lots of computer-generated effects (I’ve seen names in such films roll by in three columns). Partly it’s because, as this article suggests, some films choose to recognize more professions involved with the production.

Sometimes, though, it seems like a gambit to give a short movie a longer running time. I don’t have hard evidence to back this up, but all my movie-going friends and acquaintances believe the same thing. Sometimes movies that are “officially” less than 90 minutes seem to have extralong, leisurely credit sequences, to make the official running time at least an hour and a half. Perhaps the studios are operating on a nebulous, more-perceived-value-for-money kind of thing, as if they’ll be less likely to spend $10 on a ticket if they notice a short running time when looking up the film online. One of the first times I noticed this was at the end of the awful, blessedly forgotten Debra Messing comedy The Wedding Date.