I think that there is something going on with filmmaker and streaming platforms. Movies are becoming longer and sometimes needlessly so. That said I think they cut something out which made the bag joke not as good.
Wholeheartedly agree.
I believe this is down to digital distribution: Standard 35mm films run at an amazing 90 foot/27 meter
per minute*. This means in the days of analogue distribution, each minute of additional runtime added the cost of an additional 90 foot of film to
each copy distributed to theaters. With blockbusters like "Return of the Jedi" running on 1500+ screens in the US alone, you can imagine that studio execs put a lot of pressure on directors and editors to come in at 90 minutes or below (adding an extra minute to 1500 copies would lead to
26 extra miles of film being used). The mantra "kill your darlings", encouraging film-makers to kill their favorite scene if it does not contribute to storytelling, comes from that era.
With current cost of bandwidth and storage, digital distribution is close to free, on the contrary, watchtime even is a KPI that you can measure and boast about in quarterly reports. While I do not believe this leads to Netflix & Co actively encouraging directors to make their movies overly long, it definitely takes away any pressure to adhere to an 80/90/100/120 minute limit.
*This assumes standard 24 frames per second/4-perf frame height. If you shoot 30fps for NTSC TV use, of course the amount of feet per minute goes up. On the other hand, the reason for the ultrawidescreen employed in spaghetti western was not only artistic in nature, but also allowed them to shoot 2-perf, i.e. each frame being only two film perforations high. This halved their use of film stock compared to standard procedure.