Last weekend, a group of New Yorkers filed into a private screening room in Chelsea to watch It Ends — a new horror thriller from first-time director Alexander Ullom. The film follows a group of four college grads who go on a late-night drive, only to find themselves on a never-ending highway.
But this was no ordinary screening. The room had been stocked with supplies that seemed more suited to a nuclear bunker than a movie theater. Hosted by Neon, the film’s distributor, the event brought together a handpicked group of cinephiles for an endurance contest that required them to watch It Ends on repeat for up to 36 hours.
27-year-old Fola Olusanya was among the contestants, equipped with blankets, water bottles, Clif bars, cough drops, Tylenol and a handheld fan. She and the others had been challenged to sit through the 89-minute movie as many times as possible between Friday at 7 p.m. and Sunday at 7 a.m. Their reward? 25 cents per minute with the prize capped at $540 per person.
“I kind of tried to predict the worst-case scenario of being stuck in a movie theater for a few hours and just expanded the contents of what usually goes in my purse,” Fola told The Independent.
The “last man standing” competition, as Neon described it, required participants not to leave the theater for anything other than a bathroom break. Each person was given a $250 theater concessions credit, which excluded alcohol, and they were allowed to bring in their own snacks and drinks.
While spending a weekend in a movie theater might sound dreamy to some, Fola said watching the same film over and over again came with some painful side effects.
“The hardest part of the night was the crazy headache I had,” she recalled, adding that two of her team members suffered the same fate. “I don't really get headaches after movies at the theater, but maybe it was exhaustion, or an empathy headache because our [team’s] bond together got so strong.”
Neon selected teams of four in New York City and Los Angeles to take part in the stunt after they submitted video applications online. Those who managed to make it through the full 36 hours were promised a $500 bonus on top of the $540 they had already earned.
Fola’s group ended up completing five watches of the film and meeting director Ullom and members of the crew at the event.
“I know I could have kept going longer, but it was one of those headaches that made even laughing hurt, which sucked, because I was having a ton of fun,” she said, adding, “I knew I was kind of losing it by the end of the third watch because everything we said felt really funny, and I was super tired.”
However, delirious laughter might have been the key to enduring the movie marathon. A group of four who completed all 36 hours of the challenge said that humor helped them stay afloat during the wee hours in the Metro Private Cinema.
One of the winners, 24-year-old Veronica Gilligan, told The Independent: “Going into the screening, my group made an agreement that we would not be leaving before the 36 hours were up, and I’m proud to say we did, in fact, last the whole time.”
They completed 24 viewings of the movie and made $1,040 per person, Neon confirmed to The Independent.
“We laughed, we lived, we cried,” Yasemin, one of the winning group members, wrote in her Letterboxd review of the film. Another winner, Jake, added: “I think I memorized the whole movie. It’s baked into my subconscious now.”
As with any good rewatch, Fola found that her understanding of the film shifted with each viewing — something she said was partly shaped by talking it through with her friends.
“I definitely did not have the same reaction to the movie after each viewing,” Fola said, adding that the “shock value” of the thriller “wore off after time because I could anticipate it.”
“I think I also had time to dive deeper into different aspects of the movie during each watch — the editing, the cinematography and the characterization — and I had different reactions to each one,” she said.
Though it may have been a marketing stunt, the competition ended up mirroring the very themes at the heart of Ullom’s directorial debut: friendship and the intimacy that can emerge from a surreal, shared experience.
Actor Akira Jackson, who plays one of the four friends in It Ends, might as well have been speaking about the movie marathon when she told the New York Times recently: “This entire movie is about who you become when there’s nothing to regulate you and there’s nowhere to hide.”
“There were moments when the endlessness of the screenings became kind of annoying, mostly when we wanted to fall asleep, but it was never unbearable,” Veronica said. “A big part of why we all agreed to do the challenge in the first place was because we’re all such good friends, so it kind of felt like we were getting paid to hang out for two days straight.”
Fola too found herself relying on the group to get through the increasingly dreamlike experience. “I barely paid attention to the second watch because my group and I were dissecting what we’d seen, coming up with theories, and just chatting in general. Watches three to five were when we started reciting lines from the movie and dancing with the characters during a short sequence,” she said.
At some point, It Ends became less something they were watching and more something they were collectively living with.
“After 36 hours, we started to feel way more connected to the movie,” Veronica said. “We were quoting specific lines and creating inside jokes related to it.”
“By the end, we were pretty exhausted,” she admitted. “But I would do it again in a heartbeat.”
