No, you wouldn’t add run time at all, you would rearrange the scenes in a slightly different order with Palpatine’s message playing over interspliced scenes.
+1
Though the Skywalker ghosts watching the Falcon/sunrise as an ending shot is a neat idea!
Hey, I remember pitching something like that a couple months ago 😃
https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/The-Rise-of-Skywalker-Ascendant/id/71835/page/116#1349475
what if we put ourselves in the shoes of someone that has never seen the movie and watches this cut, they have never seen any press about Palpatine’s return, but the first they see of it is on Exegol when Kylo meets him…what if, we keep the suspense going a bit longer…
The problem is that even in this hypothetical where someone’s never heard anything about Rise of Skywalker before, there’s never any suspense at all surrounding Palpatine’s presence. Adding more runtime to the movie isn’t the same as adding suspense to it. It just drags out the confusion and busywork. It doesn’t actually add suspense. I’d argue it’s more impactful just to drop him in the movie ASAP (skipping straight to Exegol) because there’s nothing to the atmosphere of Kylo’s “quest” to find him.