Saw the 1990 version of Lord of the Flies over 30 times, but that doesn’t count because I was working in a theatre at the time.
My all-time record outside of that job would be 14 times for Dutch, quite an achievement since the movie was only in theaters for ten days! Sounds crazy, but something about the storyline spoke to me for some reason. There were actually many films back in those days that I watched 7-8 times, such as Parenthood and Stand by Me, whereas these days I’ll rarely visit the theater at all, let alone more than once for the same film. For instance, the only two movies I saw in 2013 were The Impossible and Ender’s Game, both of which I sat through twice.
Swing Kids came out when I was in middle school. I saw that one six times in theatre. The last film I felt the need to see again in theatres as an adult were the Harry Potter films but only twice.
I think the max for me is twice, on one occasion on the same day.
A bunch of us went to see Pulp Fiction, and headed to the pub afterwards. We were trying to puzzle out the sequence of events in the film, and ended up going back to catch the late night showing.
I must have seen Disney’s The Three Lives of Thomasina, a movie no one remembers today, at least four times in the summer of 1963. I would love to see it again today.
Haaaaa. I saw WALL-E in the theater three times. First with an Indian guy who thought he was dating me and thought women couldn’t handle anything over PG. Second with my Friend With Benefits who wanted to see it but didn’t want any of his friends to know he wanted to see it (a clandestine pair, we were). Third with my now-husband, who I met just after that, and I can’t remember why we picked that movie, but we did.
I remember it! I saw it in school when I was in second or third grade, and loved it. Haven’t seen it since, though. Still remember the theme song (“Thomasina, beautiful yet so vain…Thomasina, queen over all you reign…”)
I saw Star Wars episode 1, “The Phantom Menace”, seven times in the theater. The leader of our group of friends was a huge fanboy and was willing to pay for others to go with him, so we did that every weekend for a while. I have not seen it since, and do not plan to ever again.
I also watched “Newsies” every day, sometimes twice, for a whole summer when it came out on VHS.
While I’ve seen a number of films more than twice in the theater, my second theatrical viewing of Beauty and the Beast (1991) had me driving a 300 mile round-trip, from Knoxville to Nashville and back, to catch the film in IMAX.
My wife just called me from the theater, where she is about to see Gravity for the tenth time. She called to tell me that she’s the only person in there.
I’m truly staggered at how many people see movies on double-digit occasions at the theater. I’m also pretty amazed at some of the (to my mind, at least) fairly mediocre movies that some folks seem obsessed with.
Anyway, thanks to everyone who responded. It certainly opened my eyes to a demographic i wasn’t previously aware of.
The only movie I’ve seen multiple times in a theater was Good Will Hunting. I was living in Washington D.C. that summer and my dorm room didn’t have air conditioning. I spent most of my free time in movie theaters and stores trying to avoid the miserable heat.
What you may not realize is that…some of us are old As in “lived in a time before Netflix, before DVDs, before video tapes, before even HBO” old. For us oldies, for some movies (that would take YEARS before they might even be considered to be shown on broadcast television) the only way to see a movie you enjoyed again was in the theatre.
What might generate more interesting responses is “highest number of times you’ve seen a movie in the theatre that you could have seen (within a year) via ‘private viewing’ ?”
Or
“highest number of times you’ve seen a movie in the theatre since the time VCRs were readily obtainable ?”
“Star Wars” came out right at the cusp of VCRs (still pretty expensive in '77). Had it come out just a handful of years later (say '83), I wonder how many people would have seen it so many times in the theatre.
As in “lived in a time before Netflix, before DVDs, before video tapes, before even HBO” old. For us oldies, for some movies (that would take YEARS before they might even be considered to be shown on broadcast television) the only way to see a movie you enjoyed again was in the theatre.