Are movie end credits getting longer?

I saw Spider-Man: Far From Necessary over the weekend and, like everyone else in the cinema, I sat through the entire end crawl to watch the ‘post-credits scene’ that has become so ubiquitous among superhero movies.On the one hand, it’s great to see so many people get the recognition they deserve for working on such a big endeavour. On the other hand, I just wanted to get home.But it reminded me of some research I conducted earlier in the year that I haven’t yet published. I built a system to detect when the end credits begin in a movie and tracked the data for over 6,500 movies over the past 105 years of cinema.How long are end credits these days?Across all 6,515 films, the median end credits sequence runs 4 minutes 26 seconds. Half of all films sit between three and six minutes. If this feels unusually short to you, that’s because it’s changing.Have end credits got longer?In a word, yes. Spectacularly.For most of cinema’s first seventy years, the end of a film was exactly that - it…