With monumental architecture, thousands of extras, and groundbreaking special effects for its time—including visions of flying cars, robots, and video phones—Metropolis laid the foundation for the entire science fiction genre.

This futuristic tale of power, temptation, and redemption was produced between 1925 and 1926 in Berlin’s UFA Studios with an unprecedented level of effort and ambition. However, the film was a commercial failure and nearly bankrupted the production company.

In an effort to make the film more marketable, it was heavily cut from its original length of approximately 210 minutes, losing much of its narrative in the process.

During the 1970s and 1980s, the film was rediscovered and gradually experienced a renaissance. For decades, Metropolis was considered a lost Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art). Using the original screenplay, musical score, censorship records, and countless production stills, the film was painstakingly reconstructed: first in East Germany in the 1970s, then in Munich in 1988, and finally in 2001 by the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation in cooperation with the German Federal Archives in Berlin.

The most complete and faithful reconstruction to date was released in 2001 by the Murnau Foundation, with a total runtime of 118 minutes. That same year, the film was officially added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.

In 2008, film reels containing previously missing scenes were rediscovered at the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires, Argentina. These copies had been screened in South American cinemas as late as the 1960s, preserved unknowingly by a local theater operator.

The world premiere of the newly restored version by the Murnau Foundation took place on February 12, 2010, at the Berlinale Film Festival—shown in front of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate and simultaneously in Frankfurt. The event was broadcast live by ARTE.