LOL! You wacky American’s and your NTSC video format! When you guys shift over to the metric system, you should also consider moving to the PAL format. Sure, there’s a lesser frame rate but at least you don’t have to change videos half way through a movie.
Doing some quick research
The Green Mile and
Ghandi has a run time of 188 minutes while
A Bridge Too Far goes for 176 minutes. The four hour Hamlet had an interval.
Trust me, that extra time makes the difference between a well ran film and 20000 ft of film on the floor. But that’s okay, by all means continue naming films if you don’t trust me. I don’t mind.
And to address the comment that theatre managers would love it for the intermission. Not a hope in hell. Think about it, the film has twenty minutes of ads and trailers at the start, and a twenty minute interval. This means that the film is now 10 minutes short of taking up an entire cinema for five hours. Meanwhile the film next door has already run twice (double ticket sales), and had two sets of customers come through (double popcorn sales). Judging from the customers when we ran
2001: A Space Odyssey (complete with interval), only a very, very small fraction of them re-bought food and drinks
again.
And I also recall that the number one comment about
Fellowship was that it was great, but just ran too long. This is coming from Joe Public… not you guys. Theatre managers don’t care about you guys, because they know you’ll come regardless of the length.

Just wait for the DVD – you’ll get your extra footage then.