10 Famous Lost Films You Wish You Could Watch

When people talk about epic films these days, they usually talk about Titanic, the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, or Avatar. Whilst those films clocked in at 2.5 to 3 hours each, they all have nothing on Erich von Stroheim's original cut of his 1924 epic, Greed, which clocked in at a gargantuan 462 minutes.

Depicting a story in the style of Greek tragedy about, what else, greed and the effects greed can have on people, the production process of Stroheim's epic was almost as interesting as the movie was. Shot over 198 days and entirely on location, both unheard of at the time, 446,103 feet (135,972 m) of film was shot, equating to an almost insane 85 hours worth of footage.

Stroheim and his editors somehow managed to whittle that slush pile of footage down to the original 462 minute cut. Sitting through a 462 minute minute film would be an odyssey within itself and only 12 people ever did it. 

Those 12 people did proclaim Greed as the greatest film ever made, but the studio, justifiably, decided to edit the film down to a more manageable 140 minute cut. Unfortunately, not only did the film flop, but most of the remaining 322 minutes worth of cut footage has been lost and the longest restored version of Greed available today clocks in at a mere 239 minutes.