The Longest Movie Ever Made Would Take You More Than a Month to Watch

Is there an ideal movie running time? While the typical film lasts between 90 minutes and 2 hours, plenty of top-tier directors have successfully justified turning their features into 3-hour-plus cinematic affairs (to varying results). But it would be safe to say that the longest film you have ever sat thought has got nothing on Logistics—a record-breaking project released in Sweden in 2012. Clocking in at a total runtime of 35 days and 17 hours, Logistics is by far the longest movie ever made.

The Longest Movie Ever Made

Logistics isn’t your standard Hollywood epic. The experimental film, which was conceived and directed by Swedish filmmakers Erika Magnusson and Daniel Andersson, lacks any conventional structure. According to the film’s website, the concept started with the question: Where do all the gadgets come from? Magnusson and Andersson attempted to answer that question by following the life cycle of a pedometer.

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The story begins at a store in Stockholm, where the item is sold, then moves backwards to chronicle its journey to consumers. Logistics takes viewers on a truck, a freight train, a massive container ship, and finally to a factory in China’s Bao’an district. The trip unfolds in real time, so audiences get a truly—and perhaps painfully—accurate sense of the time and distance required to deliver gadgets to the people who use them on the other side of the world. You can watch a 72-minute edit of the film above.

Many people would have trouble sitting through some of the longest conventional films in history. Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (1996) lasts 242 minutes, and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra (1963) is a whopping 248 minutes long. But sitting down to watch all 857 hours of Logistics straight through is nearly physically impossible (though intrepid journalist and film critic Ashley Darrow did just that in 2022).

Fortunately, dedicating more than a month of your life to watching Logistics straight through is not the only way to enjoy this work of art. On the project’s website, Logistics has been broken down into short, two-minute clips—one for each day of the journey. You can watch the abridged version of the epic experiment here, and brag about it later.

A version of this story ran in 2020; it has been updated for 2023.