The Longest Films Ever Made

People get so uptight about long movies. They’ll happily sit at home and binge three, four, five hours of a TV show in one long sitting, then kvetch if Martin Scorsese asks them to sit in a movie theater for 206 minutes without looking at their phones.

If 206 minutes sounds long to you, get ready for a rude awakening: Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon didn’t come close to making this list of 25 of the longest motion pictures ever made. In fact, it would have needed to be at least five and a half hours longer — not five and a half hours total, five and a half hours longer on top of its existing three and a half hours — to even sniff last place on this list.

In compiling this piece I used a few sources, and did my best not to include anything that might be considered a television series. Just because some film critics put Twin Peaks: The Return on their year-end top ten movie lists doesn’t make it an 18-hour movie. (At least not to me.) When determining if something should be included, I eliminated anything released exclusively in serialized form like that. And while the line between movie and film is increasingly blurry these days, I did my best to use common sense in delineating long movies from seasons of TV. Do most people consider them movies? Are they described by experts as movies? Are they being projected in theaters (or, in some cases, in museums) on big white walls or screens where people can consume them?

If the answer was yes to all of the above, it wound up on this list of the most glute-busting cinematic experiences…

READ MORE: 10 Great Movies That Are More Than Three Hours Long

The Best Movies That Are Under 80 Minutes Long