What is the longest movie ever released in cinemas?
Since 2019, in the UK, the cinema industry has declined by 30% as the rise of streaming services, and along with that, the general soaring of the cost of living means that fewer people are heading out to the big screens.
However, when it comes to a long movie, there is no better place to be than in a reclining chair with a big bucket of popcorn, which is something that the big bosses of the streaming world just don’t seem to understand. When the Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos tried to claim that the duo release of Barbie and Oppenheimer back in 2023 would have been just as impactful if the movies had gone directly to Netflix, he brought out a truly ridiculous example, telling the New York Times, “There’s no reason to believe that the movie itself is better in any size of screen for all people”, before adding the punchline, “My son’s an editor, he watched Lawrence of Arabia on his phone”.
There is so much wrong there, beginning with the idea that one of the most historic and epic movies ever made could be as good on an iPhone as it is on the big screen, which alone is laughable. It’s a huge-scale film meant for a big-scale screen, but part of why the idea of minimising it is so ridiculous is because its run time is big-scale too.
Lawrence of Arabia is over three hours and 30 minutes long, with other cuts of the film rolling on even longer, so the idea of anyone watching that on their phone is offensive, but then the idea of them watching it in smaller parts, dipping in and out as if it’s a TV show, is even more so. The reason why the cinema is so important is that it demands focus; there are no distractions, thus the audience is locked in, able to follow the film from start to finish and go on its journey without scrolling on their phone or taking a break, unless there’s an intermission.
When it comes to long films, there is no better way to experience them than in the cinema, simply because of the fact that the cinema enables and helps you dedicate yourself to them. It’s fair enough to make the decision to watch a snappy 90-minute-long film on the TV at home, but if that run time is creeping over three hours, even further, there’s only one place to watch it.
So, what is the longest movie ever released in cinemas?
There are plenty of insanely long movies in cinematic history, such as Andy Warhol’s Empire, which is just a still shot of the Empire State Building, running for over eight hours. Then there’s Logistics, a concept film about the making of a pedometer, which runs for over 35 days, so obviously, no one is in the cinema watching the entirety of that with full focus, marking them more akin to art projects than classic movies.
Looking at movies that dare to take up more of the audience’s time, recently, we’ve seen a fair few of them as The Brutalist dominated the zeitgeist in 2025, thanks to the buzz surrounding its lengthy run time and intermission cut into the middle. Afterwards, critics wondered if director Brady Corbett might have just started a trend, bringing back daringly long movies that would make people feel like they truly got their money’s worth out of a cinema ticket.
Going back in time, though, most of the longest movies ever released to cinema came decades and decades ago, as Gone with the Wind managed to be one of history’s most iconic films as well as one of the longest at just shy of four hours long but then 1963’s Cleopatra broke that boundary with a run time of four hours and eight minutes.
However, the longest movie ever released to cinema came in 1993 as Gettysburg had audiences hooked for four hours and 14 minutes, or a whole 254 minutes, and similar to The Brutalist, edited in an intermission, cut into the middle of the film. The directors knew that audiences would need a break, so the film is split into two, giving people a chance to go to the toilet, get some more snacks, or even run for the hills if they were bored out of their minds, making the lengthy run time slightly less of an endurance challenge.
