How Long Are Movie Credits?
The median feature film end credits sequence runs 4 minutes 26 seconds, according to Stephen Follows’ analysis of 6,515 films. VFX-heavy blockbusters regularly exceed 10 minutes. The longest on record tops 37.
The question sounds simple. The answer depends on genre, budget, crew size, guild agreements, and whether the director insisted on crediting every caterer in New Zealand.
How long are movie credits in practice? For most features, expect 3 to 6 minutes of scrolling names: half of the films in Follows’ dataset land in that range, and films released in the 2020s reach 5:43. An indie drama with a 40-person crew might wrap in 3 to 4 minutes. Big-budget studio films run longer, and an animated tentpole with 2,000 VFX artists can push past 15.
This guide breaks down end credits durations for 17 well-known films, explains why credits keep getting longer, and gives filmmakers a formula for estimating their own.
How Long Are Movie Credits
Approximate Durations for Films You Know
The table below shows approximate end credits durations for well-known productions. Runtime is total listed runtime; credits duration is the time from the first end credit to the final frame. Most of these are big, high-profile titles, so they run longer than the typical feature.
| Film | Year | Runtime | Credits Duration | Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jaws | 1975 | 124 min | ~3 min | Drama/Thriller |
| Superman | 1978 | 143 min | ~7 min (plus ~5 min of opening titles) | Superhero |
| The Graduate | 1967 | 106 min | <1 min | Drama |
| Who Framed Roger Rabbit | 1988 | 104 min | ~7 min | Live/Animation |
| Space Jam | 1996 | 88 min | ~7 min | Live/Animation |
| Independence Day | 1996 | 145 min | ~9 min | Action/Sci-Fi |
| The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King | 2003 | 201 min | ~10 min | Fantasy |
| The Lego Movie | 2014 | 100 min | ~8 min | Animation |
| Avengers: Endgame | 2019 | 181 min | ~12 min | Superhero/VFX |
| Once Upon a Time in Hollywood | 2019 | 161 min | ~6 min | Drama |
| Assassin’s Creed | 2016 | 115 min | ~15 min | Action/VFX |
| Barbie | 2023 | 114 min | ~7 min | Comedy |
| Oppenheimer | 2023 | 180 min | ~7 min | Drama |
| Dune: Part Two | 2024 | 166 min | ~9 min | Sci-Fi/VFX |
| Godzilla: King of the Monsters | 2019 | 132 min | ~12 min | Action/VFX |
| Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse | 2023 | 140 min | ~10 min | Animation |
| La Flor | 2018 | 808 min | ~37 min | Art Film |
A few patterns stand out. In this table, VFX-heavy films land in the 9-to-15-minute range, while dramas with practical effects and smaller crews finish in 3 to 7 minutes. The animated titles here run 7 to 10 minutes, because digital productions require large teams even when the on-set crew is small; in Follows’ data, animation is the genre with the longest credits. Keep the wider picture in mind: across all 6,515 films Follows timed, half run between three and six minutes.
How Long Do Credits Last
Duration Benchmarks by Genre
Not all productions are built the same. Here is what to expect based on the type of film.
Indie and Low-Budget Films (under $5M) Credits typically run 2 to 5 minutes. Smaller crews mean fewer names. A 30-person production might fill only 90 seconds of scroll time. Short films at festivals often keep credits under 45 seconds to avoid being trimmed by programmers.
Mid-Budget Dramas and Comedies ($5M-$50M) Expect roughly 4 to 7 minutes. That range brackets Follows’ benchmarks: a 4:26 median across all films, 5:08 for non-superhero films, and 5:43 for 2020s releases. These productions credit full departments — associate producers, department heads, post-production supervisors — that add up even without massive VFX teams. Guild rules require only part of that list: SAG-AFTRA requires at least 50 cast members in the end titles (or the whole cast, if smaller), and IATSE agreements protect a few specific credits, such as the costume designer and the director of photography. Most of the rest is there by custom, as Follows points out.
Studio Blockbusters ($100M+) Credits commonly run 7 minutes or more, and the biggest effects-driven releases pass 10. Follows found that production budget is the strongest predictor of credit length for films made this century, and superhero films run a median of 7:09, against 5:08 for everything else. The combination of large physical crews, multiple VFX vendors, and location units across several countries pushes the name count into the thousands.
VFX-Heavy and Animated Films The longest credits in modern cinema: in Follows’ data, animation is the genre with the longest credits, and the biggest VFX tentpoles and animated features can run 10 to 15 minutes. ILM alone staffs 300 to 400 people on a single feature for up to 18 months. A film like Avengers: Infinity War contained more than 2,700 shots — according to ILM, only 80 of them were not touched by the VFX team. Each VFX shot involves modelers, riggers, animators, compositors, lighters, and pipeline engineers. The credits reflect that labor.
Television End credits on TV episodes are much shorter, typically 30 seconds to 2 minutes, though streaming-era prestige series have begun pushing longer.
Longest Movie Credits
Records and Outliers
The Guinness World Record for longest credit sequence was once shared by Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) and Richard Donner’s Superman (1978), both at approximately 12 minutes. Superman split its credits between five minutes of opening titles and seven minutes of closing.
That record has been surpassed many times since:
- Assassin’s Creed (2016) — nearly 15 minutes of end credits, driven by VFX teams across multiple international studios
- La Flor (2018) — the Argentine art film holds the unofficial record at 37 minutes of end credits, proportional to its 13-hour runtime
- Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (2003) — approximately 10 minutes, notably including members of the Tolkien Fan Club who had contributed to the production’s community engagement
The MCU franchise deserves its own mention. Marvel credits often run 10 to 12 minutes, partly because of VFX crew sizes and partly because mid-credits and post-credits scenes extend the total sequence. Across superhero films as a whole, Follows measured a median of 7:09, and his timings count those stingers as part of the credits. Avengers: Endgame begins its credits at 2:48:56 and does not reach the traditional text crawl until 2:53:17 — a gap of more than four minutes filled with stylized title cards before the full scroll even starts.
Why Movie Credits Keep Getting Longer
A Brief History of End Credits
According to Stephen Follows’ 2026 study, current movie credits are almost thirteen times longer than those of the 1950s, and almost all of that growth came from the 1970s onward.
The explosion in credits length is not vanity. It reflects real changes in how films are made and who gets recognized.
Before 1970: The Single Card Era Most films ended with a single title card listing the principal cast. In Follows’ data, the median end credits ran 25 seconds in the 1930s and just 34 seconds by the 1960s. The Graduate (1967) has almost no end credits at all. Crew members rarely appeared on screen. The audience left when the story ended.
1970s-1980s: The Scroll Begins After the studio system broke up in the late 1940s, film work became freelance and project-based, so a screen credit mattered for landing the next job. The main credits also moved from the start of the film to the end, where there was little pressure to keep them short. Star Wars (1977) is widely cited as a turning point — George Lucas gave comprehensive crew credits at a time when most directors did not. End credits more than doubled in length during the 1970s, then doubled again over the 1980s. Guild rules played a smaller part than is often assumed: according to Follows, today’s agreements mandate surprisingly little about end credits beyond the actors’ requirement to list at least 50 cast members. IATSE agreements add a handful of protected credits, but most of the crawl is there by custom rather than by contract.
1990s-2000s: VFX Changes Everything By the 1990s, end credits ran about 4 minutes. The rise of digital effects introduced entirely new departments. A single VFX facility might employ 300 to 400 specialists. As films began using multiple VFX houses, credits swelled. Independence Day (1996) had such a long credit sequence that the credits required their own shipping reel of film.
2010s-Present: The 2,000-Name Credit Roll Modern tentpoles routinely credit over 2,000 people; Follows counts 5,109 credited on Avengers: Infinity War (2018), 2,659 of them in visual effects. Across all films in his data, end credits reached 5:43 for releases from the 2020s. The 14 distinct VFX roles alone — from prep/roto artists to compositors to pipeline TDs — can generate hundreds of names per facility. According to ILM, only 80 of Infinity War’s 2,700-plus shots were not created or modified by VFX teams.
Yet even 15-minute credits leave people out. Stephen Follows’ study of 4,113 films released between 2006 and 2015 found that 7.5% of crew credits and 24.6% of cast credits are listed as officially uncredited. In VFX departments specifically, 9% of credits go uncredited.
How to Calculate Your Credits Length
The Math Behind the Scroll
If you are producing a film and need to estimate how long your end credits will run, here is the industry-standard approach.
Endcrawl, the end-titles software, shared anonymised data from 440 feature films for Stephen Follows’ 2016 analysis. The averages across those films are:
| Metric | Average |
|---|---|
| Credits duration | 227 seconds (~3.8 minutes) |
| Scroll speed | 93 pixels/second |
| Density | 65 pixels per name |
That 227-second average sits a little below the 4:26 median in Follows’ larger 2026 study, and below the 5:43 he measured for 2020s releases. For a big-budget studio feature, plan for 7 minutes or more; VFX-heavy tentpoles can pass 10.
Quick estimation formula:
- Count total names to be credited
- Multiply by 65 (average pixels per name)
- Divide by 93 (pixels per second)
- Result = approximate credits duration in seconds
For example, a film crediting 800 people: 800 x 65 = 52,000 pixels / 93 px/sec = 559 seconds (~9.3 minutes).
Scroll speed guidelines for technical implementation:
| Resolution | Recommended Speed |
|---|---|
| HD / 2K | 3 pixels per frame (at 24fps = 72 px/sec) |
| Comfortable | 4 pixels per frame (96 px/sec) |
| Maximum readable | 5 pixels per frame (120 px/sec) |
| NTSC legacy | 120 px/sec |
Aim for 3 to 4 pixels per frame at 24fps. Anything above 5 pixels per frame becomes difficult to read, especially for names in smaller type sizes. The font you choose also matters — sans-serif faces hold up better at speed.
For a deeper understanding of how credits are structured, see our film credits format and order guide, which covers the full hierarchy from above-the-line talent to end-crawl departments.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does movie runtime include end credits?
Yes. The runtime listed on IMDb, theater schedules, and streaming platforms includes end credits. If a film is listed at 120 minutes, expect the story to end somewhere around 114 to 117 minutes depending on credits length. Subtract 3 to 6 minutes from the posted runtime to estimate when the narrative actually concludes: half of all films in Stephen Follows’ analysis of 6,515 films fall in that range, with a median of 4 minutes 26 seconds. For a superhero film or other VFX-heavy blockbuster, subtract 7 minutes or more.
How long are short film credits?
Typically 30 to 60 seconds. Festival programmers may trim credits that run too long, so keep them tight. A single static card or a brief 30-second scroll is standard for shorts with crews under 20 people.
Why do some credits scroll so fast you cannot read them?
Studios sometimes compress scroll speed to reduce runtime. With VFX crews numbering in the hundreds per facility, showing every name at a comfortable reading pace could add 5 additional minutes. The result is a compromise — names appear on screen (satisfying contractual obligations) but move too quickly for casual reading.
Do post-credits scenes affect total credits length?
Directly, yes. A mid-credits or post-credits scene adds 30 seconds to 3 minutes to the overall sequence. Marvel films typically include both a mid-credits scene (after the stylized credits) and a post-credits tag (after the full text crawl), which helps push many MCU credit sequences past 10 minutes. Across all superhero films, Follows measured a median of 7:09, stingers included. Thunderbolts (2025) holds the record for the longest MCU post-credits scene at 174 seconds.
Sources and Further Reading
- Stephen Follows, “Are movie end credits getting longer?” — August 17, 2026; end credits timed for 6,515 feature films released 1920-2025 (median 4:26; sample skews toward well-known, English-language films)
- Stephen Follows, “How many movie credits go uncredited?” — statistical analysis of 4,113 films and 1.45 million credits, plus Endcrawl end-roller data for 440 films
- VFX Voice, “VFX Screen Credits: The Quest for Recognition and Respect” — industry perspectives on crew sizes and credit limitations
- Guinness World Records, “Longest Credit Sequence” — historical record holders
- ILM, “Avengers: Infinity War” — over 2,700 shots, just 80 of them without visual effects
- RunPee, “Is there anything extra during the end credits of Oppenheimer?” — Oppenheimer end credits timing (approximately 7 minutes)
Knowing how long credits run is half the equation. The other half is building them. Use an end credits maker that lets you assemble professional credits with the correct format and order, export in any resolution, and adjust scroll speed to hit your target duration — whether that is 90 seconds or 12 minutes. Start with our templates and have your credits ready in minutes, not weeks.