The truth behind those absolutely crazy 20-minute film festival ovations

There’s an epidemic of extremely lengthy standing ovations at the 2025 Venice Film Festival.

Every year it happens, without fail: the applause gets longer, the ovations more exaggerated, and the grumbling from critics and fans louder. Yet the tradition shows no sign of slowing.

This year, audiences clocked some of the longest ovations yet. Darren Aronofsky’s The Smashing Machine and Andrew Haigh’s The Testament of Ann Lee are currently tied at around 15 minutes each.

Dwayne Johnson, making one of the boldest artistic departures of his career in The Smashing Machine, appeared visibly moved as the ovation rolled on. A video from the premiere shows him wiping away tears beside co-star Emily Blunt, the crowd on its feet for a full quarter hour.

Amanda Seyfried had a similar experience with The Testament of Ann Lee, her Venice debut. The actor was seen crying during the film’s own 15-minute ovation on Monday.

Both just barely managed to surpass Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein adaptation for Netflix, starring Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi, which received just under 13 minutes of applause at its premiere a couple of days earlier.

And how did Elordi react? You guessed it, tears.

The phenomenon isn’t unique to Venice. Cannes Film Festival, with its cavernous 2,000-seat Grand Théâtre Lumière, has long been notorious for the endurance-test ovations at its premieres after the stars ascend those famous, red-carpeted stairs.

Compared with that spectacle, Venice’s more intimate Sala Grande (just over 1,000 seats) offers a cozier – but equally time-consuming – version of the ritual.

Still, it’s an odd, even antiquated metric. While applause is a traditional and welcome gesture of appreciation, the stopwatch approach to measuring it has taken on an outsized importance in recent years. Are long ovations at premieres meaningful experiences for the actors in attendance? Evidently.

But standing ovations are now treated as tea leaves, with publications and fans using them to forecast critical reception and box office prospects.

What do the standing ovations at film festivals really signify?

Anyone who’s actually sat through one can tell you: the length of applause is no measure of a film’s quality. It’s just noise, stretched out to fill the silence before the real reviews come in.

‘Once again media report #Cannes standing ovation times like sports scores while I scream at my phone “THEY DON’T MEAN ANYTHING!”,’ complained Jessica Fenton on X earlier this year, pointing out that ‘the last Indiana Jones got a 5min SO’ in 2023 before it went on to flop.

Producer Cassian Elwes observed: ‘If you’ve ever been in Cannes you know that literally every movie receives a standing ovation even The Brown Bunny (which was widely panned after). The French cinephiles on the Croisette are an enthusiastic group.’

Or, as director and film fan Luca joked after Francis Ford Coppola’s divisive comeback movie Megalopolis nabbed a standing ovation peppered with boos: ‘Every film gets a 7-minute standing ovation at Cannes… it takes a true work of art to get actual boos.’

How is the length of a standing ovation at a film festival measured?

And that’s exactly how it is in Venice, too, given that any instance of applause shorter than five minutes is a rarity.

Even if we pretended the length of a standing ovation were a credible metric for quality, there’s another problem: nobody seems to agree on how long they actually last. Different outlets measure them in different ways, often starting their clocks at different moments.

Is the countdown supposed to begin the second the credits roll and the clapping starts? When the house lights go up? When the first person rises to their feet—or only once the whole room has joined in?

The Hollywood Reporter has at least tried to codify the chaos: its reporters, ‘start the clock the moment people jump to their feet—usually after the house lights come up—and stop when most people begin to sit down or when the director is handed the mic, since the clapping inevitably pauses.’

But strategies differ between publications, resulting in discrepancies.

For example, there was some disagreement over which film received the longest ovation last year at Cannes. Arguments were made for genre-blending crime musical Emilia Pérez and Demi Moore’s bonkers and bloody body horror The Substance with equal ferocity.

According to some, both films might have clocked in at 13 minutes. Or maybe got nine minutes – or 11?

But almost every film receives a standing ovation at its Cannes or Venice premiere out of politeness, to celebrate the achievement of screening at the prestigious festival, and the occasion as a whole – after all, everyone is in evening wear and in one of the most famous cinemas in the world.

Are the lengths of standing ovations at film festivals ever manipulated?

As mentioned previously, though, as the length of standing ovations has taken on more importance in recent years, it’s hard not to wonder if the length is being intentionally manipulated in some instances.

Afterall, there are easy ways to affect the length of an ovation, as directors are often given the microphone to speak at some point, as mentioned above.

This ambiguity explains the conflicting reports around the ovation for The Room Next Door in 2024. Some counted ten minutes, others closer to twenty.

In reality, the thunderous reception was fuelled not just by the film itself, but by its stars – Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore – who stepped forward to clap along, effectively egging the crowd on. Add in the magnetic presence of Pedro Almodóvar, and the result was inevitable.

The fervor was so strong that, even before the film screened, chants of ‘Pedro! Pedro! Pedro!’ broke out as he arrived by vaporetto for the photocall and press conference – an enthusiasm that only redoubled later that evening inside the Sala Grande.

In other instances, a standing ovation may be cut short.

‘Thank you, this is really lovely, but I really want to go and party right now,’ said filmmaker Andrea Arnold at the Cannes premiere of Bird, starring Barry Keoghan, which wouldn’t exactly encourage the ovation (seven minutes in this case) to continue.

If you’re making some sort of comeback, festivals are often especially appreciative and show it with their hands (for example, legendary director Coppola with Megalopolis).

Johnny Depp also got a warm reception (seven-minute standing ovation) for his new film Jeanne du Barry at Cannes in 2023, with festival director Thierry Frémaux welcoming back the controversial figure with open arms after his legal troubles of the past few years.

Was the applause exclusively due to the ground-breaking or exceptional quality of Maïwenn’s film in this instance? Absolutely not.

It was an additional factor that it was Maïwenn’s first English-language film at the age of 74 – something which he saw as an adventure into a ‘new genre’. Its topic of euthanasia also got a lot of support, with Almodovar making an impassioned plea for its legalisation worldwide.

An audience at a film festival will also consistently reward risk-taking with lengthy applause, a fact that was demonstrated by The Testament of Ann Lee’s premiere this year.

The extremely experimental film is sure to be divisive, with several people walking out of a press screening attended by Metro. Seyfried admitted at a press event: ‘I’ve never been let loose in this way, and it was incredible.’

Essentially, there’s a lot of unheard context that goes into these clapping marathons, and a standing ovation is not a reliable indication of a film’s critical reception or quality, or how it will be received by wider audiences.

Which film holds the record for the longest standing ovation at a film festival?

So, is it fair to say that there is zero correlation between the length of the ovation a film receives and its quality? Not exactly.

Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth premiered at Cannes in 2006 to a staggering 22-minute ovation – an endurance test that still holds the record.

The film went on to become a modern classic, so in this case, the enthusiasm feels justified.

But the correlation quickly falls apart.

Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon drew 17 minutes of applause in 2016, despite also prompting walkouts during the same screening. The film flopped at the box office and divided critics, proving that stopwatch ovations are hardly reliable barometers of cinematic greatness.

So yes, the tradition will continue – it always does – but every time you hear about a ‘record-setting’ standing ovation, take it with a very large pinch of salt.

 A version of this article was first published on May 23, 2024.

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