This is one of the several projects that Scott Rudin stepped away from (the others this season being The Humans and Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch)
The runtime is under two hours, so Coen has done some serious cutting here.
Like TotallyEffed said, Macbeth rarely runs as long as other Shakespeare. It usually runs about 2 and a half hours. Cut the intermission and any set transitions and that gets you pretty close to 2 hours right there.
n2nbaby said: "The cast and crew are great but I just can’t get excited for this. We just had a great Macbeth film a few years ago! "
personally disagree. I thought that film was abysmal. Some of the most misguided, poorly-executed actor-direction I’ve ever seen in a Shakespeare film. A huge misfire IMO.
This one looks much better to me, especially with those 2 actors at the helm. My only hesitation is that I’m not a big fan of the Coen bros’ usual style, but I’m very excited to see how he does on his own, and to see what he can do with Shakespeare.
But I do agree with you on the sense that Macbeth doesn’t really need another film adaptation. There are so many Shakespeare plays that would really benefit from another (or a first) major film adaptation. But demand for them has shrunk a lot this past decade. The last one we got was the Midsummer with Lily Rabe from 2017, and that can barely be called “major” - just that it was the last one to play in theatres. And Midsummer has also been done to death.
And yes, of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Macbeth is perhaps the easiest to do with a shorter runtime. I’ve seen some great productions that clocked in at 90-100 minutes.
Polanski’s Macbeth is the best film version and I also wish they’d start tackling other Shakespeare plays. Macbeth is done over and over again, it seems.
I stand corrected on the runtime!! Def some cuts (this is listed as 105 minutes online). Feels like a great scary, oldschool adaptation...will be interesting to watch when it's on Apple TV in January.