The Film That Almost Destroyed Its Studio

Metropolis invented the visual language of the science-fiction film — the towering city, the machine cathedral, the robot double. It nearly took the biggest film studio in Europe down with it.

Fritz Lang began shooting in 1925 for UFA, then one of the largest studios in the world. Production ran 17 months, involved around 30,000 extras, 310 shooting days and roughly 620,000 metres of film. The budget climbed past 5 million Reichsmarks — a figure that made it the most expensive silent film ever produced in Germany, and one UFA could not absorb.

The film opened in January 1927. Audiences and critics admired it; it did not earn back its cost. UFA was pushed to the edge of insolvency and survived only after Alfred Hugenberg, a nationalist media magnate, bought into the company. That rescue is usually treated as a footnote. It isn't: it began the process by which German cinema's most powerful studio became an instrument of nationalist politics.

Worse for the film, it was then cut. Distributors trimmed it for length and for politics; the American release was rearranged and shortened. For eighty years Metropolis existed only in damaged versions.

In 2008 a nearly complete print was found in Buenos Aires — a 16mm copy made in the 1920s. The restored film, released in 2010, recovered around 25 minutes of material that had been considered lost.

So the most influential science-fiction film ever made is also one of the most heavily damaged. It spent most of its life as a rumour of itself.