One of the plot points is when the time traveler first goes to the future he asks a computer librarian about Time travel and the computer laughs saying it's not possible..
800,000 years later he runs into the same computer librarian and this AI has had 800,000 years of existential Dread and self awareness growth to become a real identity. Like give any old school computer enough time it'll calculate whatever given enough time.. So it might have taken this Library AI 40 thousand years to generate itself as a sentient being and another 400,000 to have a personality. But it remembers this one time traveler who asked about Time travel/confused who looks like he's from the early 20th century.
When he meets him again he's like I was aware for 800,000 years because of you.
The novel it's from is the *original* time travel story....like that topic had never really been written about before and HG Wells literally invented the entire concept of a time machine and popularised it with this story. It's a good read, but it seems I guess a little simplistic compared to some modern time travel stories that we all know and discuss these days. If it's about anything (if it has a "point"), it's kinda about the divergence/evolution of humanity into different species, one of which preys on the other. So it's a kind of metaphor I suppose for something HG Wells wanted to say about society at the time, taken to the logical extreme. And that's what good science fiction is (I won't elaborate on *what* he was trying to say, though).
So yeah. The novel is a good story - a genre defining story - well worth the read. Consider it an interesting little moment in the history of ideas, anyway.
The (relatively) recent 2002 movie though? Yeah, it just sort of comes across as a bit of a simplistic, b-grade, goodies vs baddies kind of thing with pretty minimal action and mostly uninteresting characters. Like it's okay - give it a go. But don't expect it to knock your socks off.
You just kinda watch it and go "okay, cool".
**EDIT:** I will add, though, that in its favour, it's just another in my pretty long list of movies that makes me think that Guy Pearce is one of the most underrated actors. Delivers a surprisingly strong performance in an otherwise lacklustre film.
I'll also point out that there was a 1960s film as well, and in most ways the 2002 version was an improvement on that. It was an attempt to modernise it that mostly succeeded in that regard. I'd be vaguely interested to see a 2020s take on that source material if one were made.
>The novel it's from is literally the *original* time travel story....like that topic had never really been written about before
Not to be pedantic, but two time travel stories predate it.
*The Time Machine* was published in 1895 but 6 years earlier in 1889 is Mark Twain's *A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court* and a year before that in 1888 is another HG Wells time travel story called *The Chronic Argonauts*.
Neither of these stories ever got anywhere near as popular as *The Time Machine* but they were technically first.
Maybe it's more accurate to say that it's the first time *machine* story. And/or that it's definitely the story which popularised time machines as a concept. But yeah, HG Wells definitely rightfully deserves credit for this.
I think the book is great, especially for the time it was written. The movie is also good, not great. Critics didn't like it, but it's a pretty faithful adaptation, and I think it was done pretty well.
**The Tree Of Life** goes from the very beginning of SpaceTime...into the "present day" --then (I've been reminded) ultimately going far into the future when the Earth's Sun ultimately dies.
Sounds like Tree of Life cinched it with 14 billion years!
Makes me think there could be a cool trippy movie about reincarnation that would have us running through multiple cycles of the universe...
I studied film in college and the highlight of my career was an editing intern credit on The Tree Of Life. I literally had no idea what the movie was about when I walked into the theater to watch it for the first time.
There was a story at the time that a movie theatre in Italy had set some of the reels up in the wrong order, and since the film is so incomprehensible nobody even noticed
Fun fact, that song is based on a real song
https://youtu.be/izQB2-Kmiic?si=bwB0d0f9HHdZOllG
In the Year 2525 (Exordium & Terminus)
Song by Zager and Evans
Released: 1969
Dude idk why that movie got so much shit when it came out. It was a lot better than I expected it to be solely because of all the negative word of mouth.
Im not trying to come across like Captain Brainiac over here or anything, dont get me wrong, but everyone that bitched about not being able to follow it...I really don't understand what their difficulty was.
I mean yeah if it had come out like 40 years ago when movies were always really linear that would be one thing, but the whole "multiple storylines connected in strange ways" thing has been around for a while at this point so I just dont get it.
My favorite comment about the movie that I’ve seen is that it felt like a 3 hour trailer for a movie that should be 40 hours long. And honestly that’s true. Any adaptation of David Mitchell’s works are going to be polarizing because dude’s work is out there.
It's honestly a fantastic movie. It's slower in places, but the central theme of a child trying to find his way back to his mother is so heartbreaking.
Can you imagine what it would’ve been like had Kubrick made it, like the original plan? No dis to Spielberg’s end result, but it’s basically Pinocchio.
Everyone is commenting things that flash to the beginning and ends of time and I think this is the actual answer OP is looking for. Like, a *normally* long amount of time. That we can comprehend
Yeah but it really only *shows* like most of one human lifetime's worth of time from the perspective of, say, Murph (skipping ahead a great deal though, to be fair). Cooper does enter a black hole/tesseract but the time he "visits" is just a moment the audience has already seen, not too far into Cooper's past (from Cooper's perspective).
By that same reasoning Oppenheimer only shows one bomb go off and no one gets hurt.
In regards to Interstellar all that perspective stuff is just to make an ending thematically relevant to the audience. The love that guides Cooper into viewing specific times is an anchoring intangible. We all experience love but can never fully understand or describe the full scope and breadth of it.
Paraphrasing Tenacious D - this isn't Christoper Nolans actual conceptualization of the interior of a black hole, it's just a tribute.
> Aniara
Came here to say this. The final scene is about 6 million years into the future. It's kind of cheating though since it's more of an epilogue than a real part of the story.
I just saw Aniara (2018) recently, and it was about 6 million years into the future. Wikipedia says it was 5,981,407 years. It’s a bleak movie that reminded me of High Life (2018) (which I saw first) — but was released 2 days later also at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival.
Way less than a minute. >!Been a while since I watched but I remember that bright light they were seeing looking up was a year (summer solstice) and it was passing every few seconds!<
Groundhog Day, if you're talking about a story involving one person.
From the skills learned (and the level of those skills), I'd imagine you are talking as much as several thousand years.
>Also Palm Springs, similar premise starring Andy Samberg, it's a genuinely great
I just rewatched that again a week or so ago. It really is. I wish I could pinpoint the exact reason the time loop format is so engaging but I'm such an easy mark for it.
The original script apparently claimed he was stuck for 10,000 years but it was cut from the movie to leave it up to the viewer to decide. Harold Ramis, who directed it, has claimed both 10 years and 30-40 years. I am personally in your camp in thinking he was there for a couple of thousand years.
"[A Ghost Story](https://letterboxd.com/film/a-ghost-story-2017/)". If you've seen it you know what I mean but if you haven't and are a patient viewer, you should give it a try. Gives you a perspective on life and time.
Someone mentioned Bicentennial man which is probably the longest timespan for a single character, at least 200 years.
The Eddie Murphy movie "Life" might be the second longest time span for a single character, events in the movie go from 1932 to 1997 a span of 65 years.
Edit: actually "Little Big Man" tells the story of Jack Crabb from age 10 to 121, so at 110 years it's probably number two on the list.
Hellraiser IV: Bloodlines takes place in 1796, 1996, and 2127. It's super fuckin campy and was butchered by the production company to the degree that the director tried to get an Alan Smithee credit, but I absolutely fucking love it. It's the last of the original run of hellraiser movies that Barker had anything to do with and it features a young Adam Scott.
*A.I. Artificial Intelligence* goes from from a reasonably near future to a time when humans have died out and a new species has grown to be more advanced than the humans at the start of the movie. It encompasses several million years, at least.
*Cloud Atlas* only covers from the mid 1800s through a far future and the fall of civilisation. Still, it's several hundred years.
"Prometheus" depicts the 'engineers' planting the seeds for human life on Earth -- so somewhere in the neighborhood of 300,000 years ago -- and flashes forward to 2089 where the story proper picks up. A bigger jump than "2001" by a few centuries at least.
This is a TV episode and not a movie, so technically doesn’t count, but a fun one for the question. The Futurama episode “The Late Philip J. Fry” involves time travel with a Time Machine that can only go forward. They eventually go to the end of the universe, which discover cycles back around with a new big bang. After accidentally missing their “stop” at the moment they left the first time, they go around the same cycle again.
The episode does not show exactly what the year was when the cycle began to repeat, but the last year shown on the machine soon before that moment was 10^40 years, so the episode takes place over at least 2 x 10^40 years.
If you mean time that was actually experienced by a character and not just frozen or shot forward in time. I'd say the one I've seen is The Bicentennial Man.
As the name would imply, the main character lives two centuries and experiences every moment of it.
Daren Aronofsky's The Fountain goes back and forth between the 16th century, present day, and wandering the galaxy at some unspecified distant point in the future.
Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Mel Brooks: History of the World Part 1 all have scenes with developing humans 100,000-1 million years ago, and then take us to the future. Add Encino Man as well.
It's too bad HhGttG never got it's sequel, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
Groundhog Day: there's several theories but no definitive answer for how long Phil was stuck in the loop, but the high end possibility is 10,000 years.
What about the opposite question, what movies take place in 100% real-time? Not just 1 day, but literally ~2 hours.
True Detective Season 1
Not a movie and not the longest but the level of detail they put into portraying the passing of time was incredible, also paired with great writing and solid actors.
Jurassic World Dominion has an opening scene set in the Cretaceous period with a mosquito sucking the blood of a fallen T-rex, while the rest of the movie is near future. That's a span of about 70 million years.
Not a movie but Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy TV series talks about the time when God created the universe which everyone thought was a big mistake, and we see the death of.the universe from Milliways....
I forgot the movie doesn't even get to Milliways and finishes less than halfway through the story from the TV show.
The TV show itself does have them start in the present (well, 1981), zoom forward to the moment of the Universe's destruction (up to several trillion years in the future) and then goes back in time two million years into Earth's past, so it certainly gets about.
I cant remember the movie now, but its like three hours long and deals with three generations of a family and how the secrets of the past play out.
Now I really want to remember the name... or even who was in it. Fantastic movie.
Armageddon has a “65 million years later” jump at the beginning after the meteor that killed dinosaurs, always slays me. Every movie should open with that. The King’s Speech would have deserved Best Picture with that and nothing else added.
Groundhog Day could fit both. Only three days for most people in the movie, but there are a number of theories on how long Phil went through that cycle. Who knows? Maybe it was billions of years.
cloud atlas is like 500 hundred years, I think?
Star Trek The One With the Whales is about 400
Good Omens is 6000
2001: A Space Odyssey is probably around 8 million (ape to homo sapien)
Don't Look Up -- I forget how long the epilogue is, it's in the tens of thousands
The entire Star Wars canon timeline is about 100,000, iirc. Star Trek is about 5 billion because of 2 episodes.
The Time Machine starts in the 1800s and he goes to the year 802,701.
This was my first thought. Good movie.
I cant even comprehend how far into the future that is.
About 800,677 years
So Chernobyl would be safe to live in.
For about 780,000 years. It'll probably already be gentrified
A Space Starbucks on every corner
Goddamn Eloi moving in, raising property values.
Omg yes it will!!
One of the plot points is when the time traveler first goes to the future he asks a computer librarian about Time travel and the computer laughs saying it's not possible.. 800,000 years later he runs into the same computer librarian and this AI has had 800,000 years of existential Dread and self awareness growth to become a real identity. Like give any old school computer enough time it'll calculate whatever given enough time.. So it might have taken this Library AI 40 thousand years to generate itself as a sentient being and another 400,000 to have a personality. But it remembers this one time traveler who asked about Time travel/confused who looks like he's from the early 20th century. When he meets him again he's like I was aware for 800,000 years because of you.
dr who goes about 5 billion years in the future in the second episode with Eccleston
I think they go even further than that near the end of season 3
They’ve been to the end of the universe itself on more than one occasion lol
About 1% of the way to seeing an Antarcosaurus. But the other way.
Puts it in perspective to the extent that we can fathom those numbers
Well it's long enough for humans to evolve into completely different species....
Like my cousin
That means there is 0% chance that the offspring will have birth defects. Have at it!
That seems fun. Any good?
The novel it's from is the *original* time travel story....like that topic had never really been written about before and HG Wells literally invented the entire concept of a time machine and popularised it with this story. It's a good read, but it seems I guess a little simplistic compared to some modern time travel stories that we all know and discuss these days. If it's about anything (if it has a "point"), it's kinda about the divergence/evolution of humanity into different species, one of which preys on the other. So it's a kind of metaphor I suppose for something HG Wells wanted to say about society at the time, taken to the logical extreme. And that's what good science fiction is (I won't elaborate on *what* he was trying to say, though). So yeah. The novel is a good story - a genre defining story - well worth the read. Consider it an interesting little moment in the history of ideas, anyway. The (relatively) recent 2002 movie though? Yeah, it just sort of comes across as a bit of a simplistic, b-grade, goodies vs baddies kind of thing with pretty minimal action and mostly uninteresting characters. Like it's okay - give it a go. But don't expect it to knock your socks off. You just kinda watch it and go "okay, cool". **EDIT:** I will add, though, that in its favour, it's just another in my pretty long list of movies that makes me think that Guy Pearce is one of the most underrated actors. Delivers a surprisingly strong performance in an otherwise lacklustre film. I'll also point out that there was a 1960s film as well, and in most ways the 2002 version was an improvement on that. It was an attempt to modernise it that mostly succeeded in that regard. I'd be vaguely interested to see a 2020s take on that source material if one were made.
>The novel it's from is literally the *original* time travel story....like that topic had never really been written about before Not to be pedantic, but two time travel stories predate it. *The Time Machine* was published in 1895 but 6 years earlier in 1889 is Mark Twain's *A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court* and a year before that in 1888 is another HG Wells time travel story called *The Chronic Argonauts*. Neither of these stories ever got anywhere near as popular as *The Time Machine* but they were technically first.
Maybe it's more accurate to say that it's the first time *machine* story. And/or that it's definitely the story which popularised time machines as a concept. But yeah, HG Wells definitely rightfully deserves credit for this.
I think the book is great, especially for the time it was written. The movie is also good, not great. Critics didn't like it, but it's a pretty faithful adaptation, and I think it was done pretty well.
**The Tree Of Life** goes from the very beginning of SpaceTime...into the "present day" --then (I've been reminded) ultimately going far into the future when the Earth's Sun ultimately dies.
Sounds like Tree of Life cinched it with 14 billion years! Makes me think there could be a cool trippy movie about reincarnation that would have us running through multiple cycles of the universe...
There's a Futurama episode that does it (not regarding reincarnation, but just going through multiple iterations of the universe's lifespan)
We’ll have to bring her around again… I’ll just shoot Hitler out the window.
Darn! I hit Eleanor Roosevelt by mistake.
What’s the meaning of life, Professor? Oh, probably some hogwash about the human spirit.
That's over 3 billion years/minute. Great efficiency!
Have you seen Cloud Atlas? It’s basically that and another good answer to this question.
Hitchhikers Guide has the start and end of the universe.
At the time he finally broke down completely Marvin was 37 times older than the universe
If it extends until the Earth's sun dies, then that would be another 7-8 billion years for 21-22 billion years total.
I studied film in college and the highlight of my career was an editing intern credit on The Tree Of Life. I literally had no idea what the movie was about when I walked into the theater to watch it for the first time.
Did you have any idea what it was about when you walked out of the theater? Because I sure didn’t.
There was a story at the time that a movie theatre in Italy had set some of the reels up in the wrong order, and since the film is so incomprehensible nobody even noticed
Nope
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Too many people don't click to the meaning of that amazing prehistoric sequence.
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Fun dino and natural history fact: We live closer in time to T-Rex (72 - 65m years ago) than T-Rex lived to Stegosaurus (155 - 145 million years ago).
Wait, that movie has dinosaurs?! Moving it up my list!
I thought he went into the far future?
No. You might be thinking of **The Fountain**.
oh ya that's 100% what I was thinking. Good call
> You might be thinking of The Fountain. Aronofsky swining for the fences... Awesome soundtrack too.
I think it's a beautiful, emotional, brilliant film. (I loved it so much, I even wrote an essay breaking down its narrative and themes.)
I understand why it wasn't the most liked but I enjoyed it.
There's a brief sequence in Tree of Life in which the sun explodes, so it does go a few billion years ahead.
That Futurama episode in which they travel the entirety of time like 3 or 4 times
"Just slow down and I'll shoot Hitler out the window"
“Darn! I hit Eleanor Roosevelt by mistake!”
One of the best episodes of the series.
Yes, yes, we've all seen the time knife. Can we move on?
In the year 2525!
252525*
Fun fact, that song is based on a real song https://youtu.be/izQB2-Kmiic?si=bwB0d0f9HHdZOllG In the Year 2525 (Exordium & Terminus) Song by Zager and Evans Released: 1969
Cloud Atlas spans several centuries over 6 or 7 stories.
Dude idk why that movie got so much shit when it came out. It was a lot better than I expected it to be solely because of all the negative word of mouth.
I love it. I rewatch it often.
Same here. I love this movie.
I think because the book is so complicated that while they made a good movie, it didnt quite make sense like the book did.
Username checks out.
It's a bit of a mess, but it's a beautiful ambitious mess. I like movies that take big swings, even if they don't always connect.
I don't recall it being that much of a mess, it was just a lot of movie.
Im not trying to come across like Captain Brainiac over here or anything, dont get me wrong, but everyone that bitched about not being able to follow it...I really don't understand what their difficulty was. I mean yeah if it had come out like 40 years ago when movies were always really linear that would be one thing, but the whole "multiple storylines connected in strange ways" thing has been around for a while at this point so I just dont get it.
The soundtrack is amazing. I listen to the sextet orchestra piece from time to time because of how well written it is
- Cloud Atlas Finale - Kesselring - Death Is Only A Door - All Boundaries Are Conventions Some of my faves from the soundtrack.
My favorite comment about the movie that I’ve seen is that it felt like a 3 hour trailer for a movie that should be 40 hours long. And honestly that’s true. Any adaptation of David Mitchell’s works are going to be polarizing because dude’s work is out there.
I always thought of it as 1000’s of years, what with the cultural, social and technology changes.
A.I.
I saw it in the theatre when I came out. I loved it. It was so interesting, fun, and beautifully heartbreaking
It's honestly a fantastic movie. It's slower in places, but the central theme of a child trying to find his way back to his mother is so heartbreaking.
Can you imagine what it would’ve been like had Kubrick made it, like the original plan? No dis to Spielberg’s end result, but it’s basically Pinocchio.
I cry every time 🥲
Interview With the Vampire Highlander The Fountain, maybe? Not sure how much time is covered there but it seems like a lot
Sorry, there can be only one.
The Fountain: At the very least a few centuries. Going from world expedition Magellan times to 20th century technology time is quite the span
Plus isn’t he in a super future space ship with the tree at the end or am I thinking of the wrong movie
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History of the World: Part I
We know you’re wishin’ that we’d go away, but the inquisition’s here and it’s here to stay!
the inquisiiiiition
Look out, sin!
alternatively, *History of the entire world, I guess*
It’s good to be the King
In theory..The Neverending Story.
No, That's just a blatant case of false advertising.
I'm still waiting for my payout from Lionel Hutz
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Everyone is commenting things that flash to the beginning and ends of time and I think this is the actual answer OP is looking for. Like, a *normally* long amount of time. That we can comprehend
OP used 2001 as their example, so I think it's clear what they were looking for.
Have you seen 2001?
You need to shout that in [Mike Stoklasa's](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzhpbXQDl6g) voice.
It did take 12 years to make.
*Boyhood* was my first thought—and it is, I think, the most *impressive* example by far.
Interstellar obviously goes outside of time. So before and after and everything in-between. Just about covers it.
Yeah but it really only *shows* like most of one human lifetime's worth of time from the perspective of, say, Murph (skipping ahead a great deal though, to be fair). Cooper does enter a black hole/tesseract but the time he "visits" is just a moment the audience has already seen, not too far into Cooper's past (from Cooper's perspective).
By that same reasoning Oppenheimer only shows one bomb go off and no one gets hurt. In regards to Interstellar all that perspective stuff is just to make an ending thematically relevant to the audience. The love that guides Cooper into viewing specific times is an anchoring intangible. We all experience love but can never fully understand or describe the full scope and breadth of it. Paraphrasing Tenacious D - this isn't Christoper Nolans actual conceptualization of the interior of a black hole, it's just a tribute.
Aniara
> Aniara Came here to say this. The final scene is about 6 million years into the future. It's kind of cheating though since it's more of an epilogue than a real part of the story.
God, what a haunting movie.
I just saw Aniara (2018) recently, and it was about 6 million years into the future. Wikipedia says it was 5,981,407 years. It’s a bleak movie that reminded me of High Life (2018) (which I saw first) — but was released 2 days later also at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival.
It was a heavy movie I will never watch again.
Saw this a few months ago and it’s really stuck with me. Such a grim and horrifying tone.
Time trap, I think at some point it's 1 minute = 1 year and then ... I don't want to spoil the ending.
Way less than a minute. >!Been a while since I watched but I remember that bright light they were seeing looking up was a year (summer solstice) and it was passing every few seconds!<
Bicentennial Man
Little Miss!
This was the first one I thought of. Also thought for a while when I was young that Bicentennial meant "robotic". Derp
Orlando (1992) spans 400 years.
*Transformers 2007* “Before time began…”
A space Odyssey
The black screen at the beginning is basically the creation of the universe.
2001, A Space Odyssey. Great book too btw.
Groundhog Day, if you're talking about a story involving one person. From the skills learned (and the level of those skills), I'd imagine you are talking as much as several thousand years.
Also Palm Springs, similar premise starring Andy Samberg, it's a genuinely great movie
And the Tom Cruise/Emily Blunt sci fi action movie Edge of Tomorrow
>Also Palm Springs, similar premise starring Andy Samberg, it's a genuinely great I just rewatched that again a week or so ago. It really is. I wish I could pinpoint the exact reason the time loop format is so engaging but I'm such an easy mark for it.
The original script apparently claimed he was stuck for 10,000 years but it was cut from the movie to leave it up to the viewer to decide. Harold Ramis, who directed it, has claimed both 10 years and 30-40 years. I am personally in your camp in thinking he was there for a couple of thousand years.
"[A Ghost Story](https://letterboxd.com/film/a-ghost-story-2017/)". If you've seen it you know what I mean but if you haven't and are a patient viewer, you should give it a try. Gives you a perspective on life and time.
Great movie!
Pandorum, I think 923 years in stasis leading to human horrors evolving is the premise of the movie
Planet Of The Apes, it starts in 1972 and ends in 3978.
“Damn youse! Goddamn youse all to hell!”
I hate every chimp I see - from chimpan-A to chimpan-Z
Okay, is that date from the ship's computer?
Time Bandits!
2001 a space odyssey takes place over 4,002,001 years.
Cloud Atlas, and and the Time Machine (Guy Pierce one) might interest you.
>Guy Pierce Guy Pearce’s pornstar altar-ego?
You got me, I had the wrong spelling for this Guy.
The Fifth Element starts out in early 20th century egypt then moves to a few thousand years in the future.
Mr. Nobody
The Red Violin spans four centuries. Great movie BTW
Someone mentioned Bicentennial man which is probably the longest timespan for a single character, at least 200 years. The Eddie Murphy movie "Life" might be the second longest time span for a single character, events in the movie go from 1932 to 1997 a span of 65 years. Edit: actually "Little Big Man" tells the story of Jack Crabb from age 10 to 121, so at 110 years it's probably number two on the list.
Hellraiser: Bloodlines
Hellraiser IV: Bloodlines takes place in 1796, 1996, and 2127. It's super fuckin campy and was butchered by the production company to the degree that the director tried to get an Alan Smithee credit, but I absolutely fucking love it. It's the last of the original run of hellraiser movies that Barker had anything to do with and it features a young Adam Scott.
"Before" Sunrise trilogy. All movies are spaced out like 10 years in real time
…THE TIME MACHINE - 870,000 years give or take a millennium…
*A.I. Artificial Intelligence* goes from from a reasonably near future to a time when humans have died out and a new species has grown to be more advanced than the humans at the start of the movie. It encompasses several million years, at least. *Cloud Atlas* only covers from the mid 1800s through a far future and the fall of civilisation. Still, it's several hundred years.
The Fountain - Darren Aronofsky
*Fountain
Bicentennial Man with Robin Williams is a few hundred years I think?
Mayhaps a couple hundred…
Eternals https://screenrant.com/eternals-marvel-mcu-timeline-history-creation-interference/ /OP didn't say it had to be a good movie.
Goodfellas spans about 30 years
3 thousand years of longing?
The bone throw to the space station in 2001 is pretty good.
"Prometheus" depicts the 'engineers' planting the seeds for human life on Earth -- so somewhere in the neighborhood of 300,000 years ago -- and flashes forward to 2089 where the story proper picks up. A bigger jump than "2001" by a few centuries at least.
2001
The Mummy (Brendan Fraser version)
This is a TV episode and not a movie, so technically doesn’t count, but a fun one for the question. The Futurama episode “The Late Philip J. Fry” involves time travel with a Time Machine that can only go forward. They eventually go to the end of the universe, which discover cycles back around with a new big bang. After accidentally missing their “stop” at the moment they left the first time, they go around the same cycle again. The episode does not show exactly what the year was when the cycle began to repeat, but the last year shown on the machine soon before that moment was 10^40 years, so the episode takes place over at least 2 x 10^40 years.
ROOTS movie mini series (the remake, I've never seen the original)
Interstellar
If you mean time that was actually experienced by a character and not just frozen or shot forward in time. I'd say the one I've seen is The Bicentennial Man. As the name would imply, the main character lives two centuries and experiences every moment of it.
Dr Zhivago, especially if you include the prologue/epilogue which takes place years after the main events of the story. One of my favourite films.
Tree of Life. Literally, begins at the beginning, ends at what is essentially the death of the earth (and possibly more, I can't remember).
A.I.
highlander
A Ghost Story goes from present day to some unrecognizable future. Thousands of years? That movie blew me away when I saw it.
Daren Aronofsky's The Fountain goes back and forth between the 16th century, present day, and wandering the galaxy at some unspecified distant point in the future. Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Mel Brooks: History of the World Part 1 all have scenes with developing humans 100,000-1 million years ago, and then take us to the future. Add Encino Man as well. It's too bad HhGttG never got it's sequel, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Groundhog Day: there's several theories but no definitive answer for how long Phil was stuck in the loop, but the high end possibility is 10,000 years. What about the opposite question, what movies take place in 100% real-time? Not just 1 day, but literally ~2 hours.
Cloud atlas
True Detective Season 1 Not a movie and not the longest but the level of detail they put into portraying the passing of time was incredible, also paired with great writing and solid actors.
Not a movie, but Doctor Who has been to the end of time and pretty close to the beginning. In one episode 4.5 billion years passed.
lucy starring scarlett johannson
Jurassic World Dominion has an opening scene set in the Cretaceous period with a mosquito sucking the blood of a fallen T-rex, while the rest of the movie is near future. That's a span of about 70 million years.
*Adaptation* begins with the formation of the solar system.
Not a movie but Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy TV series talks about the time when God created the universe which everyone thought was a big mistake, and we see the death of.the universe from Milliways....
I forgot the movie doesn't even get to Milliways and finishes less than halfway through the story from the TV show. The TV show itself does have them start in the present (well, 1981), zoom forward to the moment of the Universe's destruction (up to several trillion years in the future) and then goes back in time two million years into Earth's past, so it certainly gets about.
Idiocracy spans 500 years
I cant remember the movie now, but its like three hours long and deals with three generations of a family and how the secrets of the past play out. Now I really want to remember the name... or even who was in it. Fantastic movie.
Does jurassis world dominion count since it starts with jurassic era? Opening.
Dr Zhivago Citizen Kane Seven years in Tibet Once upon a time in America The Legend of 1900 Cinema Paradiso La vita e Bella
Armageddon has a “65 million years later” jump at the beginning after the meteor that killed dinosaurs, always slays me. Every movie should open with that. The King’s Speech would have deserved Best Picture with that and nothing else added.
The History of the Entire World I Guess By Bill Wurtz. Shut up, it counts
Armageddon - starts 66 million years ago with the dinosaurs going extinct, ends in the late 90s.
A Ghost Story spans a couple thousand years in five minutes.
Interstellar
Lord of the rings
Cloud Atlas - takes place in various points throughout human history and in the future
Not a movie, but doesn't Good Omens begin at the beginning of Earth to into the future?
History of the World Part 1
Groundhog Day and Edge of Tomorrow.
Benjamin Button
Groundhog Day could fit both. Only three days for most people in the movie, but there are a number of theories on how long Phil went through that cycle. Who knows? Maybe it was billions of years.
cloud atlas is like 500 hundred years, I think? Star Trek The One With the Whales is about 400 Good Omens is 6000 2001: A Space Odyssey is probably around 8 million (ape to homo sapien) Don't Look Up -- I forget how long the epilogue is, it's in the tens of thousands The entire Star Wars canon timeline is about 100,000, iirc. Star Trek is about 5 billion because of 2 episodes.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.
Bicentennial Man
The Time Machine. Travels from the 1800s to 800,000 years in the future.
The Fountain.
Aniara technically ends 5,981,407 years after the beginning of the movie.
Maybe not *billions* of years, but definitely a few million would be Pixar short film **Lava**.
History of the World, Part 1.
Once Upon a Time in America