Slow-Paced Beginnings in Live-Action Films.
- Alien takes 20 minutes to land on the Death World, 5 more to find the derelict ship, and yet another 10 before the Face Hugger attacks — and then you have to wait a few minutes longer for the Chest Burster to emerge, and by the time you get to full-grown Xenomorph, it's over an hour into the movie. It builds a setting and atmosphere, but the scenes are slow, and at times silent (such as the shuttle landing and most of the walking, which almost feels like taking place in real time).
- If you hadn't been spoiled by the trailers, the DVD covers, or the DVD menu, the first half-hour of Audition is a fairly low key romantic drama about Aoyama losing his wife, being pressured into the dating scene again, taking part in a staged audition run by his friend to find the perfect wife, meeting former ballet dancer Asami, and immediately falling in love with her, before Aoyama calls Asami to ask her out and the scene cuts to Asami sitting alone in a filthy apartment staring at the phone while a large burlap sack rolls around next to her. That's when the movie gets exciting.
- Babylon (2022) lasts three hours. The first hour contains a lot of events, but all that happens in the story is that Nellie gets her first screen role, and Manny starts working backstage. It might have been possible to move things along a bit faster.
- The BFG: The movie is known for having a slow pace overall, but in the beginning when the Giant takes Sophie to his house the movie spends at least 30-40 long minutes there.
- Burning (2018): This film lasts nearly two and a half hours, and not much happens in the first half. Some events become significant with hindsight, but don't seem important at the time.
- Cast Away takes at least a half-hour to set up everything before Chuck winds up stranded on the island.
- Cloud Atlas: Though the first twenty minutes or so of the film are hard to follow, it becomes easier to comprehend the non-linear stories after you get to know all of the protagonists.
- Death Proof is known for its extended opening - which features a lot of Slice of Life and Seinfeldian Conversations between the protagonists. Forty-five minutes in and a car crash kills off the entire cast, and there's a Time Skip to two years later with a different set of protagonists.
- Definitely present in the Best Picture Winner The Deer Hunter, a war film where it takes 45 whole minutes before the heroes even get to the war. Yes, it's kind of the point of the movie to show that war destroys the lives of normal, hard-working Rust Belters, but holy crap, does that wedding scene go on forever.
- Dr. Strangelove is fairly pedestrian and slow-paced for the first fifteen-to-twenty minutes, with a couple of good lines, until the viewers get to The War Room and suddenly it becomes hilarious and stays that way for the rest of the film.
- Goliath Awaits: The movie takes about forty minutes or so for the divers to get inside of the Goliath and get a look at its society.
- The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is nearly three hours long. The first 45 minutes are just Blondie and Tuco's shenanigans, with a minor subplot involving Angel Eyes searching for a guy who ultimately becomes a plot point. It's only about the 45-minute mark that Blondie and Tuco finally find out about the buried gold and begin searching for it. Strangely, this is a case where this was not only done deliberately, but it works on a level that allows the film to build atmosphere and character, and even if you get bored by the first part, the main plot just gets better, to the point where the greatest scene in the whole film is saved for the very end.
- Hulk takes a whopping 40 minutes before you even get to see the jolly green giant on screen.
- Interstellar takes a while before the protagonists get into space, establishing the Crapsack World that Earth has now become. It's about twenty-five minutes before NASA is even brought into the film.
- Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom has a first act that was seen as a trite rehash of The Lost World: Jurassic Park (heroes go to island to save dinosaurs only to come across mercenaries trying to steal the dinosaurs for a Corrupt Corporate Executive). However, things improve when the heroes return to the mainland and the film turns into a horror movie with the appearance of the Indoraptor.
- Zack Snyder's Justice League: The first half of the (four hours long) film is very slow-paced in order to help establish the cast and the general status quo of the movie. The team doesn't fully form until two hours in (and it's a full hour before Barry Allen even appears), but once that happens, the pace picks up pretty significantly.
- In the 1933, 1976, and 2005 versions of King Kong, it always takes an extremely long period of time for the titular ape to appear on-screen for the first time.
- Little Miss Sunshine is billed as a comedy, but the first act is quite dry and surprisingly bleak domestic drama. The comedy doesn't really start until the main characters hit the road twenty minutes in.
- The film version of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring takes thirty minutes to just get the hobbits out of the Shire. The extended edition takes almost fifty.
- Maleficent has A Minor Kidroduction for the titular fairy. It lasts surprisingly long, as the intent is to show what Maleficent was like before her Face–Heel Turn.
- Matinee: The screening of the Show Within a Show B-Movie is one of the most important, humorous, and iconic parts of the movie, but it only takes up the last third or so of the movie.
- MirrorMask begins with a grand tour of the boredom of circus life. While it fleshes out the heroine's relationship with her parents and thus gives the subsequent Magical Land adventure real stakes, and sets up a lot of visual callbacks (and significance for the I Know You're In There Somewhere Juggling) for later, the only plot-moving event in this stretch is the mother falling ill.
- Following A Minor Kidroduction, Ophelia focuses on depicting Ophelia's life at Elsinore, her relationship with her family, Gertrude and the other ladies, and her budding romance with Hamlet, as well as Gertrude's marital strife and growing feelings for Claudius. While this helps to set the scene and provides more characterization for Ophelia and Gertrude, it takes around 30-40 minutes until King Hamlet kicks the bucket, which is the cause of the film's central conflict; it then takes even longer for Hamlet to discover his dad might've been murdered and start plotting revenge (for comparison, in the original play the king has already died when the story begins and Hamlet finds out about the alleged murder in the first act).
- Sergio Leone has said Once Upon a Time in the West is supposed to reflect the process of death, slow-paced with breaths of amazing (usually duels).
- Paul Blart: Mall Cop Takes a bit of time before the main Die Hard plot sets in with showing the title character in his fairly mundane life and existence for the first act or so.
- The Pink Panther (1963) begins very slow and moves along like a drama until it somewhat abruptly breaks into the slapstick and chase scenes the series is known for.
- The Producers begins with an unnecessarily long sequence where Bloom engages in a lengthy conversation with Bialystock in order to illustrate how slimy Bialystock is followed by an equally lengthy exposition about how the Broadway scam is supposed to work. On the other hand, it has some of the best lines of the movie ("My blanket! MY BABY BLUE BLANKET!").
- The Reef leans so hard on Nothing Is Scarier that the shark doesn’t show up until the second half.
- Scott Pilgrim vs. The World starts off slowly. The first Evil Ex doesn't appear until about 40 minutes in, making it seem like nothing more than some hipster comedy about a dweeb's love life. The idea is to establish all of Scott's inadequacies and progress his courtship with the unattainable Ramona to the point where he has to fight her evil exes.
- Turnabout from 1940 is a comedy about a husband and wife switching bodies and one of the earliest examples in film of both a "Freaky Friday" Flip and the Gender Bender trope. The body swap doesn't happen until 36 minutes into an 82-minute long movie, with almost half the run time dedicated to showing the main characters' normal lives. For comparison, Freaky Friday (1976) which is slightly longer than the 1940 film has the swap take place 11 minutes into the runtime.
- Evident in Stargate and Atlantis: The Lost Empire, where not only does it take the expedition ages to discover civilization, but scenes of the team linguist overcoming the language barrier immediately follow, seeming like additional Padding. The latter film was originally supposed to have even more battles with creatures in the ocean before the characters reach Atlantis but Executive Meddling put the kibosh on that and this is one case where it was arguably a good thing.
- The Last House on the Left Suffers from this big time. The first 20 minutes or so consist of the two girls hanging out and smoking pot along with some really lame comedy before the film really gets going.
- Both the ending and the beginning of the horror movie The Strangers: at the beginning the viewers see a text explaining how many American citizens are estimated to be involved in violent crimes a year, a voiceover, in wannabe The Texas Chainsaw Massacre style, explaining what had happened, and shots from the freaking end. And at the end, they make it pretty obvious that Kristen is going to let out a huge scream and turn out to be Not Quite Dead.
- Them! is a movie about mutated giant ants. Except for the first half-hour, where it's a leisurely-paced police procedural set in the New Mexico desert instead.
- From the Twilight series: Breaking Dawn Part 2 is, for the most part, a fairly banal and boring affair... until you reach the action climax where the movie suddenly decides to kick all kinds of ass. It's a sight to behold, really.
- This Day is nearly two hours long, yet the actual plot doesn't start until nearly 40 minutes in; the first third mostly just consists of sex scenes, shopping montages, sex scenes, rich people hanging around doing leisure activities, and more sex scenes. Things get much crazier after Laura appears to catch Massimo cheating on her with his Psycho Ex-Girlfriend and runs off with her gardener, and it's revealed Massimo's evil twin brother has teamed up with the psycho ex to get revenge on him.
- 2001: A Space Odyssey. Over ten minutes of deserts and apes before the viewers see any outer space exploration. And even then it's lots of nothing until the stuff with HAL starts happening. You actually can fast forward past the space station and moon segments — well over a half over of the film — and all you'll miss is they found something on the moon and they're going to find out what it is.
- The Wicker Man (1973) is traditionally labelled as one of the great classic horror films, which can confuse first-time viewers because it really doesn't begin like one. The first half is a slow and bewildering parade of scenic location footage, nudity, musical numbers, and psychedelic pop music. After that, horror icon Christopher Lee suddenly shows up in all his ominous glory, things get serious fast, and all the goofy stuff turns out to be set up for some very dark, unsettling payoffs.
