Twenty-four viewings. Thirty-six hours. One film that refused to end.
That was the gruelling challenge set by Neon, the distributor behind horror thriller It Ends, when it invited a select group of film enthusiasts to spend an entire weekend in a Chelsea screening room last weekend. The rules were simple: watch the 89-minute directorial debut of Alexander Ullom on a relentless loop, with breaks permitted only for essential trips to the lavatory. The prize? A modest sum of 25 cents per minute watched—capped at $540 per person, with a $500 bonus for those brave enough to endure the full marathon.
The Bunker-Ready Brigade
Fola Olusanya, 27, arrived at the Metro Private Cinema armed with provisions that would not have looked out of place in an underground shelter: blankets, water bottles, Clif bars, cough drops, Tylenol, and a handheld fan. She was not alone. Dozens of other contestants had descended upon the private screening room, their bags bulging with supplies they hoped would see them through what Neon had ominously dubbed a “last man standing” competition.
“I kind of tried to predict the worst-case scenario of being stuck in a movie theatre for a few hours and just expanded the contents of what usually goes in my purse,” Olusanya explained, reflecting on her preparations for what would become a deeply peculiar weekend.
Participants had been selected through video applications submitted in both New York and Los Angeles, with teams of four chosen to take part in the endurance test. Each contestant received a $250 theatre concessions credit—alcohol excluded—though many had brought their own provisions in hopes of staving off hunger during the long haul ahead.
When Films Become Hallucinations
The first few viewings passed without incident. By the fifth, things began to shift. Olusanya’s group managed five complete watches of the film before she called it quits, defeated not by boredom but by a splitting headache that she says made even laughing painful.
“The hardest part of the night was the crazy headache I had,” she recalled, noting that two of her teammates suffered the same fate. “I don’t really get headaches after movies at the theatre, but maybe it was exhaustion, or an empathy headache because our bond together got so strong.”
Yet delirium, it seems, may have been the secret weapon. One victorious team—comprising 24-year-old Veronica Gilligan and her three companions—completed all 24 viewings, earning $1,040 each in the process. Their survival strategy? Unfiltered gallows humour and an unshakeable commitment to seeing it through.
“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,” Gilligan told The Independent.
Her teammate Yasemin captured the experience succinctly in her Letterboxd review: “We laughed, we lived, we cried.” Another winner, Jake, offered a more unsettling assessment: “I think I memorised the whole movie. It’s baked into my subconscious now.”
Friendship Forged in Repetition
What began as a marketing stunt gradually transformed into something more profound. The marathon, it turned out, was mirroring the very themes at the heart of Ullom’s debut: friendship and the strange intimacy that emerges from shared, surreal experiences.
Actor Akira Jackson, who portrays one of the four friends trapped in It Ends—a group of graduates finding themselves on a never-ending road trip—had recently told the New York Times: “This entire movie is about who you become when there’s nothing to regulate you and there’s nowhere to hide.”
Those words could easily have described the marathon itself.
“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,” Gilligan admitted. “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.”
Olusanya found herself similarly buoyed by her team’s camaraderie. “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.”
By the end, the film had ceased to be something the participants merely watched. It had become something they were living with.
“After 36 hours, we started to feel way more connected to the movie,” Gilligan said. “We were quoting specific lines and creating inside jokes related to it.”
Olusanya noted that her understanding of the film shifted dramatically with each successive viewing—a phenomenon she attributes partly to the collective analysis that emerged from her group dynamic. “The shock value of the thriller wore off after time because I could anticipate it. But I think I also had time to dive deeper into different aspects of the movie during each watch—the editing, the cinematography and the characterisation—and I had different reactions to each one.”
Gilligan’s verdict was unequivocal: “By the end, we were pretty exhausted. But I would do it again in a heartbeat.”
Why it Matters
Neon’s marathon may have been designed as a publicity gambit for an indie horror release, but it inadvertently served as a fascinating experiment in collective viewing and the nature of cinematic immersion. In an era when streaming has made film consumption increasingly solitary, this 36-hour ordeal proved that the shared theatrical experience—when pushed to absurdist extremes—can forge bonds that linger long after the credits roll. For It Ends, the stunt also raises intriguing questions about whether endurance testing a film’s narrative through repetition reveals depths invisible to casual viewers, or simply exhausts their patience. Either way, the winning team’s parting words speak volumes: by the end, they weren’t just watching a film about friendship—they were living proof of it.
