Cosm to Screen 'Shrek' Continuously for 25 Years, Ending Only When Every Seat Has Been Sat In
Cosm launches its Universal partnership by locking audiences inside a shared-reality Shrek marathon that will not stop until the ogre's 25th anniversary is matched minute for minute.
Cosm opened its Universal partnership by sealing the doors of its Inglewood, Dallas and Detroit venues and beginning a continuous screening of Shrek that will run for 25 years, one year for every year since the film's original release. Patrons who entered on the first morning have been issued numbered cushions and a timetable assigning each of them a mandatory seated shift of no fewer than nine hours a day.
The company calls the format «shared-reality endurance presentation». A spokesperson explained that the film will restart the moment it ends, without credits, and that the house lights will come up only when the final available seat in each auditorium has been occupied by a human being for a full cycle. «We are not showing a movie,» the spokesperson said. «We are completing it.»
Within a week, the Detroit location had converted two parking structures into dormitories and hired a permanent ogre-costume division of 340 performers whose job is to walk the aisles and check that nobody is asleep during the swamp scenes. Local restaurants now deliver meals in onion-shaped containers. A nearby school has moved its entire curriculum into the lobby.
Cosm has announced that the same treatment awaits every Universal title in the partnership, with the next run scheduled to begin the day the Shrek cycle ends. Applications for the first shift are being accepted at the door, in person, on foot.
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