20 Best Movies Over Three Hours Long

How long should a movie be? It's a question as old as time, like the chicken and the egg riddle or, what's the meaning of life? Unlike those two, though, this one has a serious answer: A movie should be as long as it needs to be.

As with all great art, movies are about quality, not quantity, as the following motion pictures will demonstrate. It doesn't matter if it's one hundred hours long or ten minutes, only if what it does is any good at resonating with audiences, and leaving an impression with what it has to say, and how it says it.

From war dramas to family dramas, action epics to comedy-thrillers, the following 20 movies are all part of a rare group of three-hour movie, a statistic that tends to make people either roll their eyes or rejoice. These are examples of movies that, whilst longer than some may be excited to sit through, are more than worth the time.

With that in mind, from the works of Steven Spielberg to recent Netflix hits, here are 20 great movies that are over three hours long.

Runtime: 3 hours, 3 minutes

Back in 2022, Indian action-drama RRR took the world by storm. It wasn't just a hit in India, where it quickly became one of the country's highest grossing films, but also in the west, too, where audiences flocked to it in droves when it debuted over on Netflix.

Returning to it after its historic run, which also saw it become the first Indian film to win an Oscar, it's easy to see why RRR was such a hit. A fictionalised story of two revolutionaries and their fight against the British Empire, the film employs a deliriously over-the-top execution to tell its otherwise powerful story of resistance against colonialism.

With extravagant musical numbers, wild action sequences and sweeping set pieces, the wonderfully outrageous experience spends its three-hour run hitting audiences with one audacious risk after the other - its fiery tiger fights and bromance montage come to mind - and it never runs out of steam.

Its runtime zips by, and for a film over 180 minutes long, that sure is a feat to admire. What a ride.