John Williams’ brother, Don: Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Score Will Include ‘Every Theme That You Ever Heard’ (from IGN)
(with an inference that Episode IX runs for 135 minutes…)
It has been a while since I have heard Jar Jar’s theme 😉
Actually the scores of movies in general and Star Wars specifically are shorter than the actual runtime of the film. Having seen ANH and TESB with an orchestra, one of the first things I noticed is, that there are a number of scenes in both films, that don’t have any music at all. For example the trash compactor scene doesn’t have any score. So, if the score for TROS runs 135 min, we can expect TROS to have a runtime closer to 3 hrs.
It should be pointed out that quite often scenes are scored but then the decision is made in editing that the scene works better with no music. Case in point - the lightsaber duel in ESB is almost entirely scored, but very little of the score appears in the film. So the total minutes of score written and recorded is often quite a bit higher than the amount of score actually used in the film.
Which isn’t to say that every minute of the film is scored from the get go, there’s plenty of scenes that are never scored, too. But I don’t think you can get 3 hours from 135 minutes of score. Probably closer to 2.5 hours, with maybe 110-120 minutes of the written score used in the 150 minutes of runtime.