(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Thu 6 November 2025 17:45, UK
Some people have no issues watching a movie two days in a row, or even more, while others need a little bit of breathing room before revisiting a film, no matter how much they enjoyed it. Since he watched one over a dozen times in a single weekend, it goes without saying which camp Billy Bob Thornton falls into.
To be honest, the prospect of seeing the same picture that many times in 48 hours is somewhere between daunting and haunting. Sure, plenty of folks have gone to back-to-back, or even back-to-back-to-back screenings of something they’ve loved, but anything beyond double figures is ludicrous, quite frankly.
Not that we’re here to judge, especially when Thornton has always shown himself to be an unusual guy. On one hand, watching one movie 14 times between Friday and Sunday is nuts, but when the guy watching it is terrified of Benjamin Disraeli’s facial hair, antique furniture, and Komodo dragons, who also thought My Little Pony had spiritual similarities with the Jonestown massacre, it makes a bit more sense.
Was it even a stone-cold classic, all-time icon, or bastion of cinematic excellence that he devoted an entire weekend to? No, it was not. Instead, it was a comedic mystery with shades of horror that starred Don Knotts in his first notable post-Andy Griffith Show role, where he played an idiot who spends the night at a haunted house.
“I love that movie,” he told Rotten Tomatoes, celebrating his love for 1966’s The Ghost and Mr Chicken. “When I was a kid, I went to the movie theatre and saw it 14 times the first weekend. You could see it over and over; they wouldn’t kick you out of the theatre back then, so I would just stay there every day and watch it.”
You might think that’s reasonable when the Academy Award winner was only ten years old when it was released, because children have no issues rewatching the same thing over and over. However, half a century later, his opinion hasn’t changed. “To this day, I still love that movie,” he said. “I think it’s brilliant.”
“Sometimes with things like that, you attach a certain period of your life to it, and I saw this when I was a kid,” he explained. “If I’d been 40 years old in 1966, maybe I would have felt differently.” An excellent point; since it was a core memory for Thornton as a nipper, has he been blinded by the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia, developing a fear that if he watched The Ghost and Mr Chicken as an adult, he’d discover that it was awful?
Not quite, seeing as he was asked if he’d revisited it since his 14-time weekend. “Oh yeah, I own it,” the Landman star shared. “I watch it all the time.” That sort of defeats the point he’d just made, but if a grown man wants to spend his free time watching a Don Knotts comedy on a regular basis, then they’re entitled to do that, even if that person is Billy Bob Thornton.
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