Longest Bollywood film ever made was 4 hours long, had 33 heroes, but was a massive flop, ended careers of a dozen stars

Ranbir Kapoor’s upcoming film Animal is well over 3 hours long. In the time of OTT boom and shortened attention spans, many are calling this duration a gamble. But there was a time when a 3-hour duration was the norm for most Hindi films and anything over that was considered lengthy. And a few Hindi films even flirted with the four-hour mark in terms of their theatrical release cuts. The longest Hindi film of all time was over four hours long, packed 33 heroes in it, and still went on to bea flop at the box office.

The longest Bollywood film with 255 minute duration

JP Dutta’s war drama LOC Kargil has the distinction of being the longest Hindi film ever made with a duration of 4 hours and 15 minutes. Govind Nihalani’s Tamas was longer still at 4 hours and 44 minutes but it was a TV film released as a mini series divided in episodes and never had theatrical release. This technicality gives LOC Kargil the top spot. The film was released in 2003 and was one of the biggest Indian films of the time, bringing in several actors from across India to retell the story of Indian Army’s triumph in the Kargil War.

How LOC Kargil had 33 heroes

Expanding on the template of war films set by Haqeeqat and his own hit Border, JP Dutta decided to tell the story of every major gallantry award winner of the army from the Kargil War. This meant that the film had nearly three dozen protagonists, for which Dutta hired 33 actors from across India. This included bug stars like Sanjay Dutt, Ajay Devgn, Saif Ali Khan, Abhishek Bachchan, Nagarjuna, and Akshaye Khanna, along with character actors like Manoj Bajpayee, Ashutosh Rana, Sudesh Berry, Raj Babbar, Mohnish Behl, and Avtar Gill. Along with them were over a dozen leading actresses, including Rani Muerji, Kareena Kapoor, Raveena Tandon, Esha Deol, and many others. Yet, this star-studded ensemble did the film no good.

LOC Kargil’s dismal box office performance

LOC Kargil suffered due to director JP Dutta trying to tell so many stories instead of focussing on just a few. The film received negative reviews, which affected the word of mouth. That meant that the film underperformed. Made on a massive budget (at the time) of Rs 33 crore, it grossed only Rs 31 crore worldwide and less than Rs 20 crore net in India, making it a massive box office failure. While the big stars sailed through, many of the young actors’ careers suffered with the failure of the film. Many like Karan Nath, Armaan Kohli, Puru Raajkumar, Shahzad Khan, Amar Upadhyay, Bikram Saluja, Vineet Sharma, Deepak Jethi, Priya Gill, Akanksha Malhotra, and Akbar Naqvi saw their careers hit a roadblock after LOC Kargil. Many of them continued to work but did not attain the kind of success they would have hoped for.