The Longest Movies Ever

After watching Lawrence of Arabia, a 4-hour event, including the 30-minute intermission with a 3.5 minute overture, we began talking about how long a movie should be.  It’s difficult to say, but looking at the list below, there seems to be a pattern of gluttony with certain directors.  Popular directors whose movies err on the long side include Martin Scorsese with 7 movies over 2.5 hours, Peter Jackson with 6 movies, and Michael Bay (5 over 2.5 with only 1 over 3 hrs).  Then there’s David Lean (2 at well over 3 hrs), Stanley Kubrick (2 over 3 hrs and 2 more above ~2.5), Francis Ford Coppola (with 2 over 3 hrs, and 1 more over 2.5 hrs), and Oliver Stone (with two over 3 hrs, and writer of Scarface, very close to 3 hrs).  Just my observations.  There may be some more modern directors who push close to 3 hours, but I can’t think of them off the top of my head.

What surprised me was that Avatar wasn’t that long, at 2 hrs 42 min.  In fact, Titanic was about 30 minutes longer than Avatar.  And Transformers 4 was 3 minutes longer!  I also found it funny (gluttonous?) how all the movies in Michael Bay’s Transformers series are longer than 2 hours 20 minutes!

It’s also tough to compare different generations of movies, since run times include credits which nowadays can run up to 9 minutes long!  Compare that to movies before 1970’s that only had like 3 credit slides and then “The End”.  That’s like no more than maybe 60 seconds of credits.