This 27-hour Star Wars marathon sounds like a handy way to tucker out ornery nerds
There has never been more Star Wars in our lives—the kind of sentence that sounds great on paper back in, say, 1995, but now feels more like some kind of pop culture curse. (It’s sort of the franchised Disney version of “May you live in interesting times,” rather than “May the Force be with you.”) The raw time-sucking power of the 8—soon to be 9—films in the main Star Wars series has never been more apparent than today, though, as AMC announced this week that it’s launching a 27-hour marathon of all three trilogies, culminating in the chance to see The Rise Of Skywalker a whole hour before everybody else.
Obviously, that 27-hour running time includes a lot of breaks to air out the old Stormtrooper helmet; skipping movies like Solo and Rogue One, the run-time of the first 8 episodes comes out to something like 18 hours. Still, that’s a lot of Star Wars, especially when you consider that these marathons tend to run chronologically by episode order, which means you’ve got a whole big glass of sand to choke down before getting to the good stuff.
In case you would like a full portrait of what (nearly) that much Star Wars can do to a human being, we would humbly direct your attention toward this piece that A.V. Club associate editor/unofficial masochist Alex McLevy wrote back in 2015. True, said marathon didn’t come as close to killing Alex as his later attempts to binge the Marvel movies might have done, but still: It’s too much god damn Star Wars, even with two fewer movies to sit through.
That being said, if this is part of a subtle attempt to leech off some of the rabid “fan” energy that greeted the release of 2017's The Last Jedi, we can’t say we blame anyone for orchestrating it—especially since stumbling, bleary-eyed and drowning in the accumulated weight of our culture’s ongoing Star Wars obsession feels like the perfect metaphor for bringing this Disney trilogy to a close.