Did you enjoy Captain Marvel? A lot of people did, as it’s been out for nearly two months and is still in the North American box office top five, and is doing a bang-up job everywhere else, too. But presumably few like it as much as one Steve Ruppel, a Wisconsin man who claims he has seen the latest MCU outing 116 times. Do you love anything — movie, band or even a person — enough to see it/them 116 times?
This comes from IndieWire, who caught Ruppel boasting about his singular accomplishment to his local news station. “I thought it was the most insane thing ever, I thought it was impossible,” Ruppel told WSAW . “I wasn’t even sure why it was even a record, but I thought after a while ‘I should probably do that.’”
For the record, Captain Marvel runs 125 minutes, meaning Ruppel has spent some 241 hours watching Brie Larson fly around and shoot energy out of her fists and not know her past as an earthling. That’s not even factoring in trailers, nor the lost time he spent checking his phone or twiddling his thumbs in between bumpers during the epic end credits.
As per IndieWire, Ruppel does have a job and, yes, it’s been tricky chasing this dream while keeping the lights on. “I’ve had to take time off work, I would take long lunch breaks to accommodate watching an entire movie in that particular time frame,” said Ruppel. “And then just time on the weekends where I’m not doing other things.”
Ruppel says he saw Captain Marvel seven time in one day, and he staved off boredom by focusing on specific details — implying this feat was pursued less out of amour fou than for a Guinness record. Indeed, he knows people can’t simply take him at his word.
“To be official, I have to have certain pictures taken, like in front of a movie poster, and I need to have two written witness statements saying that I was actually there,” Ruppel said. “So I’m trying to think, if anyone wanted to break this, I really don’t want to re-break it. Cause this has been pretty tough. It’s been a finite amount of time, but I don’t think I’m going to try this one again.”
On top of being the first female-driven episode of the MCU, Captain Marvel was, at a hair over two hours, also one of the shortest. (Truly that may be one of its best qualities.) Let’s see if anyone attempts to equal Ruppel’s number with the forthcoming Avengers: Endgame, which runs nearly an hour longer.
(Via IndieWire)