Last Wednesday, my wife went to see the Alfonso Cuarón movie Gravity…
…for the eighth time!!!
There are a few of my favorite movies that I’ve seen eight or more times, but always on TV or DVD; the most times I’ve ever seen a movie at the theater is twice.
My wife says she loves everything about Gravity, and particularly loves the immersive experience of watching it on the big screen. I couldn’t imagine going that many times, especially not in the space of about 6 weeks.
So, what’s your record? What was the movie, and how many times did you see it? And why?
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a movie more than twice in the theater - usually when I’ve already seen it with friends but my dad still wants to catch it.
I saw Marvel’s Avengers four times in the theater. Once by myself, because I really wanted to see it. Later I took the kids and my nephew. Then a few weeks later my wife and I went out with another couple and they all wanted to see it, and I didn’t mind seeing it again. Then about two weeks later I was on a business trip walking through the city and I passed a movie theater and I decided to go see whatever was about to start – and it was Avengers again, so I went with it.
Other than that I can’t recall seeing any movie more than once in a theater, although there was one summer I watched Better Off Dead thirty-two times on VHS.
Summer of 1986 (?) I probably [del]saw[/del] attended showings of Top Gun at least ten times. There wasn’t a lot going on in our small town, but you could always start looking for it at the movie theater.
I saw the sequel to the Blair Witch Project…which is an awful movie, maybe 4 or 5, maybe more times with different friends, my girlfriend at the time, etc. at different times. They all wanted to see it despite my warnings. I could practically recite it word for word then.
I’m hard-pressed to think of anything I saw more than twice in a theater, and that’s counting drive-ins and “art theaters” along with standard theaters. Most likely the multiple viewings would have been pre-TV which for me was mid-1950’s. Big-screen stuff like Cinerama and I-Max was a one-time experience for me. But CinemaScope may have been the sort of thing I’d have seen more than once.
Maybe Rebel Without A Cause or East of Eden, but not Giant. Maybe A Streetcar named Desire.
I’m sure I saw Lawrence of Arabia twice in a theater.
I’m really unsure of how many times I saw Rocky Horror or the Wall so discounting the midnight movies, it would be between Star Trek IV (The Whale Movie), Roger Rabbit or Little Shop of Horror. I think it was 4 times for each of them. I did see Ghostbusters twice the same day.
Star Trek IV is saw opening day, went with different friends to a Drive-In, then 2 more times over the next few weeks. It helped my ship was the ship that stood in for the USS Enterprise CVN-65. So my fellow ship-mates were invested in seeing this movie and it was a great movie.
Roger Rabbit, I’m not sure why I saw it so many times, I really enjoyed and through our Special Service department tickets were only $2.25 so it was easy to keep going. Little Shop of Horror kind of was like a Rocky Horror experience for a small group of friends of mine. They went 10+ times, I only went 4.
Star Wars, 6 times. Twice during its original release (I was 12, and convincing my parents to let me see a movie again took a lot of lobbying), once when it was re-released into theaters a year or so later, and three more times when the Special Edition came out in 1997.
A friend of mine, who was in his early 20s when Star Wars was first in the theaters, and who did not have much of a social life at the time, went to see it every day after work for a month in the summer of 1977.
Eeek, forgot about Rocky Horror. My group of college friends would go to the midnight showing fairly regularly for a year or two; I’d guess I’ve seen it in a theater at least a dozen times.
I saw Dark Knight three times in theaters. It’s not that I thought it was the greatest thing ever or anything (though I do like it quite a bit), it just turned out that way, seeing it with different people each time.
