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

Lengthy standing ovations have become an enduring part of film festival culture (Picture: AFP via Getty Images)

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.

Dwayne Johnson weeps during the 15-minute #Venezia2025 standing ovation for ‘The Smashing Machine.’ This was the most emotion we’ve since on the Lido since Brendan Fraser launched his Oscar campaign here four years ago for ‘The Whale.’ Ramin Setoodeh (@RaminSetoodeh) September 1, 2025 Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt star in The Smashing Machine, which received a 20 minute standing ovation at Venice (Picture: JB Lacroix/FilmMagic) Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi and Guillermo Del Toro received a 13-minute standing ovation at the premiere of their new Frankenstein adaptation (Picture: Elisabetta A. Villa/Getty Images)

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? Is there any correlation between a film’s quality and the length of the ovation it receives? (Picture: AFP via Getty Images)

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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.

The Testament of Ann Lee, starring Amanda Seyfried, received a similar reception at its premiere this year Comment nowWhich films would you give a standing ovation?Comment Now

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.

The length of standing ovations vary depending on who you ask – making it an even more unreliable indicator (Picture: AFP via Getty Images)

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?