A Chelsea movie theater is about to become the site of a very strange endurance test: watch the same 87-minute horror movie on a loop for 36 hours straight, and walk away with as much as $1,040 in cash plus $250 in snack credit. The catch is you need three friends willing to suffer alongside you, and you all have to be at least 21 years old and living in New York City.
The stunt, dubbed The Endless Screening, comes courtesy of NEON, the distributor behind It Ends, a new horror film making its way to the marathon before opening nationwide on August 28. According to Time Out, teams of four must endure roughly 25 back-to-back viewings of the film at Metro Private Cinema, located at 131 8th Avenue, starting at 7 p.m. on August 21 and running until 7 a.m. on August 23. Time Out's global film editor Phil de Semlyen reported the marathon includes designated breaks and unspecified surprises along the way, though the bulk of the challenge is simply staying put and staying awake.
The venue itself is no accident. Metro Private Cinema is a luxury 20-screen private screening concept that opened in Chelsea last year, founded by Tim League, who also co-founded NEON and Alamo Drafthouse, according to Time Out's earlier reporting on the space. That internal connection made the Chelsea address a natural fit for a distributor looking to stage a splashy hometown promotional event.
How the Prize Money Adds Up
The math behind the payout is precise. Per the article, each participant earns $0.25 for every minute they remain in the competition, capping out at $540 for the full 36-hour stretch, and every member of a team that completes the marathon together receives an additional $500 group bonus. That brings the maximum possible haul to $1,040 in cash per person, on top of a $250 credit for snacks and non-alcoholic drinks at the theater, as Gizmodo's breakdown of the contest terms lays out in detail.
Getting a shot at that money requires more than just showing up. Contest entrants must submit a video under 60 seconds on Instagram, using the hashtag #ItEndsMarathonContest and tagging @itendsmovie, naming all four group members, with submissions due by 11:59 p.m. Pacific time on August 17, according to Gizmodo. In that clip, teams are expected to explain why they're suitable for the task, per the contest terms described by Time Out.
A Film About Being Trapped, Mirrored by the Contest
There's a thematic wink built into the whole exercise. It Ends follows four graduates driving a Jeep late at night to grab food who turn onto a never-ending two-lane hellscape populated by unspecified horrors and cosmic forces, according to Time Out's account of the plot. Alex Ullom directed the film in his feature debut, and Collider reported that Ullom spent eight years developing the project, describing it as “if Linklater made horror” and building a story around Gen Z existential anxiety set almost entirely inside a moving car. The cast, made up of Phinehas Yoon, Akira Jackson, Noah Toth, and Mitchell Cole, performs the vast majority of the film's 87 minutes together inside a single Jeep Cherokee, per Collider's reporting.
Trapping four real strangers, or friends, inside a Chelsea theater for 36 hours to watch four fictional friends trapped inside a Jeep is the kind of promotional stunt NEON has built a reputation for. The studio, whose distribution credits include Anora and Parasite according to Time Out, previously ran a mysterious telephone hotline to promote its 2024 film Longlegs that drew over 250,000 calls in 48 hours and helped generate a $22.4 million opening weekend, as Marketing Brew reported at the time.
Festival Run and a Bigger Rollout
It Ends made its world premiere at SXSW in March 2025 before making the rounds at Fantasia, the Overlook Film Festival, and Telluride Horror Show, according to Fangoria. The outlet also noted that the film was selected as one of the inaugural titles on Letterboxd's Video Store digital platform back in December 2025, ahead of its theatrical push, giving it a head start building a cult following among cinephiles before the marathon stunt ever came together.
NEON isn't stopping at Chelsea, either. The distributor is inviting independent movie theaters across the country to partner up and host their own local versions of The Endless Screening, according to Awards Radar, turning what started as a single Chelsea cash giveaway into a potential nationwide theatrical promotion. Paying audiences to endure a scary movie is hardly new: Collider has traced the tradition back to 1958, when director William Castle offered ticket buyers a $1,000 Lloyd's of London life insurance policy in case they died of fright watching his film Macabre, a gimmick that helped set the template for the kind of stunt now playing out at 131 8th Avenue nearly seven decades later.
