Is 'The Fate Of The Furious' Going To Be A Two And A Half Hour, Bladder-Buckling Epic? [Updated]

UPDATE: It seems that The Fate of the Furious has started screening and it's definitely not 160 minutes long:

@JacobSHall Hey, man. Fate screened last week, I was in attendance. There's no NDA, but I can definitely tell you it wasn't 160 minutes.

— PJ Campbell (@pj_campbell) February 20, 2017

The original post follows below.

Part of the charm of the Fast and Furious series has been its willingness to throw caution to the wind and give in to its every indulgence. Once the movies began to leave their humble street racing origins in the dust, they began to fly. Literally. Because they were driving cars off skyscrapers and so on. And it's starting to sound like the running times may be catching up to the series' increasingly grandiose scale. If the internet is to be believed (and the internet is never wrong and has never influenced the world in a negative or unfortunate way), The Fate of the Furious is long enough to demand an overture and an intermission.

According to Cinemarx.ro (via ScreenCrush), the eighth Fast and Furious movie is 160 minutes long, which isn't that much shorter than Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. That's only four minutes shorter than The Dark Knight Rises, the previous holder of the Summer Blockbuster "Wait, That Movie Is How Long?" award.

Let's put this in perspective:

In other words, each movie has gotten longer as the stories have gotten more bizarre and insane (although we can argue that it all peaked with the near-perfect fifth film). Mathematically speaking, this implies that The Fate of the Furious will be the nuttiest movie ever made and will end with Vin Diesel driving a hijacked 18-wheeler straight through the moon.

Or this could all be nonsense, and we're letting ourselves get distracted by some amusing news on a slow day. Then again, this would be the first time in human history that someone on the internet got something wrong and man, I'm not sure how we'd all deal with the horrible news that the things we see online can occasionally be incorrect.

In all seriousness, news like this does often leak in unexpected and stupid ways, much like how plot details protected for years often get completely ruined by toy packaging.

The Fate of the Furious (how is that the real title?!) is directed by F. Gary Gray and will hit theaters on April 14, 2017. The trailers feature a submarine joining in a car chase, and Helen Mirren is playing Jason Statham's mom, so I'm entirely willing to believe this thing is 160 minute-long because nothing else matters or makes sense.