Movies were big in 2023, in every sense. Even during the months when the writers’ and actors’ strikes put much of Hollywood on hold, the medium occupied more space than usual in the public imagination. New movie releases suddenly started to seem like events that mattered—an impression confirmed by the fortuitous confluence of Barbie and Oppenheimer on their shared opening weekend and, a few months later, by the industry-changing theater booking strategy of Taylor Swift. Movies were also big in the more literal sense that a startling percentage of the year’s most successful and talked-about releases were really freaking long....