The movies that took the longest to make were not delayed by a few months of reshoots. They were held up for decades by lost funding, legal battles, studio fights and changing technology. Some of their creators did not even live to see them finished. Here are five films that spent between 32 and 48 years in production before they finally reached audiences.
1. Balikbayan #1: 45 Years in the Making
Filipino filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik began shooting Balikbayan #1: Memories of Overdevelopment in the late 1970s, right after his second film. It tells the story of Enrique, the enslaved man from the Malay world who sailed with Ferdinand Magellan and may have been the first person to circle the globe. Shot on 16mm, the project stalled when money ran out and some of the footage was lost.
Tahimik returned to it decades later, cast his own son and mixed the old footage with new scenes. A version premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2015 and won the Caligari Film Prize, but he kept reworking it until he finally declared it finished in 2023, 45 years after it began.
2. Savira Mettilu: 38 Years in the Making
Savira Mettilu is a Kannada film that legendary director Puttanna Kanagal started in 1968. Production stopped the same year and the film sat unfinished for decades. Kanagal died in 1985 without ever seeing it released. The remaining portions were eventually shot and completed by D. B. Basave Gowda, and the film was finally released in October 2006, 38 years after the cameras first rolled.
3. Mad God: One of the Movies That Took the Longest to Make
Mad God is the passion project of Phil Tippett, the Oscar-winning visual effects artist behind Star Wars, RoboCop and Jurassic Park. Among all the movies that took the longest to make, this one is unique because Tippett animated much of it himself. He started the dark, dialogue-free stop-motion film in 1987, but shelved it when computer animation took over the industry in the early 1990s.
Around 2010, members of his studio encouraged him to pick it back up. With the help of volunteers working on weekends and funding from Kickstarter, Tippett finally completed Mad God. It premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in 2021 and was released on Shudder in 2022.
4. The King and the Mockingbird: 32 Years in the Making
French animator Paul Grimault and poet Jacques Prévert began work on this adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep in 1948. Their producer released an unfinished version in 1952 without their approval. Grimault spent years buying back the rights to the film, then reworked it with Prévert, adding new animation and a new ending.
The finished film, Le Roi et l’Oiseau, was released in 1980, 32 years after it began. Of all the movies that took the longest to make, it may be the most influential. It is now considered a classic of French animation, and Studio Ghibli founders Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata have cited it as a major influence.
5. The Other Side of the Wind: 48 Years in the Making
Orson Welles began shooting The Other Side of the Wind in 1970, with John Huston playing an aging Hollywood director and Peter Bogdanovich in a key role. Filming dragged on until 1976, and the project became trapped in financial and legal disputes, including a fight over ownership involving its Iranian backers after the 1979 revolution.
Welles died in 1985 with more than 100 hours of footage left unedited. As with several other movies that took the longest to make, rescue came from outside. Netflix finally funded the completion of the film, and it premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2018, 48 years after Welles started it, making it the longest wait on this list.
Movies That Took the Longest to Make: What They Have in Common
These films show how fragile filmmaking can be. Money, rights and technology can stop a project in its tracks, but the persistence of their creators, and sometimes the people who carried on after them, eventually brought each one to the screen.
Learn more about the story of The Other Side of the Wind.
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