I bought a ticket to Speed Racer in 2008 as a joke. I bought a ticket to Speed Racer in 2026 to see the greatest piece of American cinema in theaters one more time and El Paso, you can join me this weekend at Premiere Cinemas. But let me tell you why you absolutely WANT to join me first. Buckle in.
I want to be completely transparent with you about that. I was a film snob. I was the kind of person who used the word “cinema” with a completely straight face and thought the highest form of art was anything brooding, ambiguous, and filmed on 16mm. So when I heard that the Wachowskis, the directors who had literally changed the course of Hollywood with The Matrix, had decided their big follow-up would be a live action adaptation of a 1960s anime about a guy named Speed Racer…I laughed. I bought the ticket the same way someone buys a novelty hat. Ironically. For the bit.
I cried three times during that movie.
Not once. Three times. And I would do it again, and I will do it again, because Premiere Cinemas here in El Paso is one of the 225 locations across the country selected to screen the newly remastered Speed Racer during the weekend of April 25th. Our showtimes are April 25th, April 26th, and April 29th. And if you have any love for great filmmaking, for family, for the kind of movie that sneaks up behind you and absolutely destroys you emotionally while simultaneously assaulting your eyeballs with the most beautiful neon chaos you have ever witnessed, you need to be in that theater.
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Why Should El Pasoans Go See This Box Office Disaster?
When Speed Racer hit theaters on May 9th, 2008, it made $93.9 million against a $120 million budget. Critics were not kind. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus at the time called it overloaded with headache-inducing effects. Audiences largely stayed home. By every conventional Hollywood metric, Speed Racer was a failure…