Director Rob Zombie’s reboot of The Munsters is rumored to have an incredibly lengthy runtime, which might be a problem for the sitcom revival. Rob Zombie is set to revive The Munsters, and the horror legend could not be a better fit for the long-formant sitcom franchise. After all, The Munsters fused horror tropes with goofy comedy and warped family dynamics, all of which abound in Zombie’s earlier movies.
Announcements surrounding Zombie's plan to remake The Munsters into a new feature film surfaced in March 2021. Since then, behind-the-scenes looks into the project, which will be released simultaneously in theaters and on Peacock, have been shared by the filmmaker. Casting info and accuracy to the source material have been major topics among those looking forward to the Munsters reboot. However, the Munsters reboot risks repeating Zombie's Halloween remake mistakes.
Like Halloween, The Munsters is a much-loved cult favorite Zombie has wanted to reboot for years. Still, like Halloween, the new movie could be derailed by the director over-indulging his idiosyncrasies. In this regard, rumors of The Munsters reboot boasting a runtime of over two and half hours may not bode well for the movie. According to those rumors, Zombie’s Munsters reboot has a runtime just shy of 2 hours and 40 minutes. While there is no way to say how long a given movie should or not be, particularly when little is known about the story of The Munsters, this is still a surprisingly ambitious runtime for a family comedy. For comparison, the similarly macabre family comedies of the Addams Family franchise were all limited to under two-hour runtimes, with most of the movies clocking in at little over ninety minutes. In theory, the length of any movie comes down to what the story requires and what pacing works for the plot, but an almost three-hour runtime is undeniably long for The Munsters, as well as being Zombie's longest movie by some distance.
None of Zombie’s earlier directorial efforts are over two hours long, which is striking considering how many reviews of Halloween 2007, The Devil’s Rejects, and The Lords of Salem cited excessively long runtimes among each movie’s issues. Although Zombie has shown a deep reverence for The Munsters and a passion for the project throughout its lengthy production, it is worth remembering that Zombie’s divisive Halloween 2007 also justified changing Michael Myers’s appeal because the director wanted to give the source material his own original spin. The fact that The Munsters already has such a long runtime, despite being based on a briskly paced sitcom series, means that Zombie runs the risk of once again losing the elements that made the original property so appealing for fans.
Furthermore, even if Zombie’s reboot of The Munsters doesn’t stray too far from the original show’s tone, a bloated runtime may mean the movie could feel too self-indulgent. Two hours and forty minutes is a long time to keep any comedy premise feeling fresh, and The Munsters may struggle to justify its long duration even if the movie is true to the tone of the original show. When The Bob’s Burgers Movie and The Simpsons Movie both clock in at well under two hours, the idea of a sitcom adaptation running to almost three hours should give even long-time fans of The Munsters and Zombie's work pause. However, only time will tell whether Rob Zombie’s The Munsters reboot can overcome this potential problem when the movie arrives later in 2022.