Kevin Smith has a reputation to uphold as the geek’s geek. That seems to be safe, too, as he’s revealed in an interview that he’s now seen Avengers: Infinity War an eye-popping 53 times.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I liked the movie. The Russo Brothers did an excellent job of cramming pretty much every MCU hero into the narrative without it seeming over-stuffed, Thanos was an excellent villain and the Snap sequence was one of the more memorable and shocking movie moments of the year. However, having seen it once in the cinema, I didn’t exactly feel in a rush to go back to it.
That doesn’t seem to be the case for Smith though, who explained on Facebook that he’d recently attended a party for the Russo’s new project Deadly Class, where he told the directors how many times he watched their film.
“We had a premiere party last night where I got to, it’s made by the Russo Brothers right, they produced it, so I got to meet Anthony Russo and fucking just blew him about these movies,” Smith said. “I was like ‘bro, I’ve seen Infinity War 53 times…like, and it just keeps getting better. I was just like Beetlejuice.”
Perhaps we’re just men of different tastes, but I genuinely struggle to imagine how anyone could watch any movie 53 times, let alone one that only released eight months ago. Having done a bit of number crunching, my estimates are that given Infinity War is 160 minutes long, it means that Smith has spent nearly six whole days just watching it. I guess his recent heart attack (happily, he seems to have made a good recovery) meant he spent a lot of time in bed, during which time he presumably had the film on a loop.
Anyways, he went on to explain just how much the movie means to him, saying:
“I told him how important it is to me. Like “you’re doing the Lord’s work man because like I shouldn’t give a shit about this. Like I know how the sausage is made man, I work in the movie business, and yet, these fucking movies capture and the show they did, Deadly Class as well, they capture my imagination. Make me feel young again. They make me forget that I like do this for a living. I’m obviously not that… I don’t do Spider-Man, but I’m like in the entertainment business too and I completely fucking forget and I just get reduced to a total movie buff and fanboy like I was when I was a kid. I love that feeling. I love that somebody can make a 48-year-old man feel like he’s 11, watching Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time.”
I shudder to think how many times Smith will have seen Avengers: Infinity War by the time Avengers: Endgame hits cinemas. The way it’s going, though, we wouldn’t be surprised if he hits triple digits.
