Yet another superhero movie with a bloated, endless final battle

If I could edit 10 or 15 minutes out of the final reel, it could easily get an 8/10 and make my top 10 of 2019. Although it obviously would have been even better to just avoid unnecessarily spending so much money on battle sequence special effects to begin with! Do they really have audience research that shows it is necessary to make these so long? Or are they just engaged in an arms race and everyone is afraid to pull back? Because I really feel like even if you cut out 10 or 15 minutes like I said, it would still be plenty long enough.

Postscript: After writing the above, I figured I would check the actual movie to see how that would all shake out. There’s a five minute battle with the villain, then a nine minute break, followed by a continuous 28 minute final battle before the coda. That’s just way too long! 15 minutes would be plenty. And that would bring the movie in under two hours. Although in the director’s commentary on deleted scenes, he pointed out that some of the scenes with the foster family were favorites of his but had to be cut for time. Put those back in instead!

That’s a lot of complaining, I realize; but I did really like this movie. It’s just a shame to see a potentially better movie get brought down a peg by this kind of de rigueur Hollywood studio trope. Pretty much every film critic complains about this every time a superhero movie comes out. Now, sometimes the hoi polloi can genuinely be into stuff that critics find hokey or tiresome, and they are the ones who pay the bills. I just wonder if that’s actually true in this instance. If no one ever dares to go shorter, how would we know?