“Endgame” in a small Italian town

Warning: some spoilers

Avengers fever has hit our valley. Sebastian went with friends to see Avengers: Endgame in Italian on opening night in a packed theater in a small Italian town. (Not the theater you are picturing—it’s a theater from 1836, highly decorated, ringed by four floors of tiny boxes with three or four seats each.) He was so excited that we insisted we go to the English-version screening the following evening at the multiplex in the larger town of Arezzo.

As this was one of the few showings in English our theater was packed with Americans. It was fun to compare the experience of seeing the film with an American audience with how Sebastian described the all-Italian audience in the smaller town. Our American crowd, largely consisting groups of teen boys, was pretty darn quiet and reserved. It didn’t feel like there was a shared sense of catharsis and that we were all kinda there on our own seeing the film, although we were in a group.

Not how Sebastian and his friends experienced the movie. First of all, there was a large age range of attendees. He said that groups of middle-aged friends (sans kids) were as common as groups of teens, and many families with small kids. He came out of the movie buzzing, and it said it was largely because of how the whole theater of 400 was responding to the film throughout. It went from a shared gasp of feeling and shock when Hawkeye’s daughter disappears in the opening scene, to laughing shouted comments on the heavy-handed Audi product placement, to absolute, stunned silence when the dead superheros return in yellow orbs with Dr. Strange. (Sebastian said he, and the person next to him, and it felt like the whole audience, was trembling. And this is from a 15-year old.) Many people cried, and there were cheers throughout.

I wish I had of seen that version, but again, I’m one of those people who think it is the most delightful thing in the world when airplanes full of Italians applaud and cheer upon landing—much to the disdain of the often British minority of passengers. There’s something about this accessibility and ease about emotions that I just can’t get enough of.