I hope this isn’t considered threadshitting, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie in a theater more than once. (and I rarely watch a movie at home more than once)
I saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull separately once each with my wife and my dad. I saw The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring separately with my wife and a college buddy. A fairly recent 3D re-release of Jurassic Park brought my theater screening count for that movie up to twelve including viewings from 1993.
Ready Player One.
Took my son to see it and we both liked it. He wanted to see it again so we went and took his friend the second time around at an IMAX theatre.
I was in high school when The Fast and the Furious came out. My friends and I were really into cars at the time. I saw it in the theater multiple times.
I don’t think I’ve seen any other movie more than once.
Return of the Jedi is the only movie I saw in the theater more than once. I won some tickets for it in a raffle after I had already seen it, so I went with some friends and saw it again.
That’s the one I was going to mention. Saw it in the original release, then months later there was at the time a run-down old 1960s single-screen theater that had reopened as a second-run $1.00 theater near me (as opposed to a 20-minute or so drive to the next closest theater) and I saw it a couple of more times. So 1983.
Why would you? I saw Star Wars something like six times at the theater(I was 4 or 5!) and over the years, I saw others more than once- Raiders of the Lost Ark, Wrath of Khan, etc…
But that was in the days when movies would play in the first release, vanish from theaters altogether, and either be re-released later (as Star Wars was more than once), or just languish until it was eventually, years and years later, shown on broadcast TV.
Once VCRs came around, this changed a little bit- rather than it languishing forever, they usually released the movies on videotape at least a year after the theatrical run, and you could rent it. So even then it was worth seeing a good movie more than once during its initial run.
But in the past decade or two, we’ve switched to a shorter release period on DVD like a few months, to now even near-simultaneous streaming/theater releases, a-la “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs”.
So there’s no longer motivation to see it in the theater a second time if you can just go stream it later, or buy the disc off Amazon in a few weeks.
The last movie I remember seeing more than once in the theater was “Braveheart” back in 1995, not because it was so awesome, but because I saw it in college, and then when I was home for Xmas, my father and brother were going to see it, so I tagged along.
Blazing Saddles, but I’m not sure if seeing one-off re-releases of classics (there was a theater in LA that would show it every year around my birthday) count for the purposes of this thread.
Once with Mrs. Cups right when it came out and another time with my Dad because he hadn’t seen it yet.
The last time it was just me was The Dark Knight Rises, saw it in theaters with my Dad and then saw it a second time because I actually really, really like that movie and I had a shitty day and needed an escape for a few hours.
It wasn’t just that I had been waiting on the movie for a good bit, but that I had a number of friends who all wanted to go see it with me that had different schedules. Think I ended up seeing it 7 times.
Probably the only movie that I saw in theaters more than once. Not sure, I think I may have seen one of the Lord of the Rings movies twice in theaters with two groups of friends, but it was long enough ago, and not so much of an event that I remember clearly for sure or which one it would have been.
The only new releases (or re-release) I’ve ever paid to see twice:
*Live and Let Die *(1973) - At the time, good enough to see twice.
Star Wars (1977) - Not as good the second time.
Fantasia (1940) - In both cases, the offensive racist-caricatured centaur was missing (I saw it later in clips recorded off an apparently inadvertent Disney Channel TV broadcast).