View From the Bushes

It turns out that on the day before the release of the Lord of the Rings that selected theaters are going to have a one-time showing of all three movies. They're going to start with the extended edition of "The Fellowship of the Ring," then the extended edition of "The Two Towers" and then end with the very first showing of "The Return of the King." As you can imagine, this is a geek's wet dream. As such, there's some scalping going on for these tickets, and it's amazing what they're going for. For example, here's two tickets to the movie in Boston going for $355.

So each of the extended editions is three and a half hours, and I've heard that "Return of the King" may not come in much under that. So 10+ hours, plus I've heard, though I can't confirm, that there's an hour break between movies which means that if all you did was drive to the movie, get there the minute it started and leave as soon as it ended that's probably 13 hours. But if you did that, you'd have front row sets 10 feet away from the screen and 10 hours of neck strain to work out with your doctor over the next several months. So any true geek is going to want to maximize this $175/ticket experience by showing up at least three hours in advance. Suddenly, you're looking at a 16 hour day, and that's if you're content to show up at the "last minute" I image there may be people showing up 12 or more hours in advance (a friend of mine showed up 8 hours early for the first showing of "Matrix Reloaded" and still wasn't first in line). On the one hand, it seems like a colossal waste of time, on the other hand I really wish I could spend 24 hours just to see all the Lord of the Rings Movies.

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Ross