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An enormous amount has been made lately about Barbie and (to a lesser extent) Oppenheimer reversing the terminal decline of the theatrical cinema experience. The films have enmeshed themselves in the cultural conversation in ways that movies simply don’t do any more and, as a result, scores of people who don’t habitually go to the cinema are being dragged out to see them. This is a good thing. Anything that prolongs the life of cinema deserves to be celebrated.
Which isn’t to say that it’s a perfect outcome, because all these newcomers have clearly forgotten how cinemas are supposed to work. The last few weeks have seen a rash of headlines about a number of regrettable blow-ups that have occurred because people just can’t seem to remember the basic rules of cinema etiquette any more.
In Maidstone, a woman took her ticketless child into Barbie; an act that resulted in a stand-up, full-volume physical fight. A Brazilian Barbie screening ended with a similar brawl, apparently because a woman let her child watch YouTube throughout the movie. Nor is this confined to Barbie. In June, a fight broke out at a screening of The Little Mermaid in Florida, and in March the same thing happened in France at the end of Creed III. Meanwhile, Twitter is awash with tales of poor cinema etiquette, from talking during films to taking photos during films.
Now, there are two ways of looking at this. The first is that social media – TikTok especially – has made it easier for people to record and publish fights in cinemas, to the extent that the Maidstone melee seems to have been posted by multiple accounts from multiple angles, like a sort of mega Zapruder. Perhaps, for all we know, cinemas have always been a tinderbox of mouthy idiots itching for a scrap, but it’s only since the advent of shareable video that anyone has actually noticed.
But then again, the fact that all these fights were recorded on phones – in an environment that repeatedly and explicitly discourages the use of phones – speaks to a deterioration of etiquette in itself. Plus, as a regular cinemagoer myself, I’ve seen first-hand the lack of basic common sense that has trickled in over the last few months.
I went to see Barbie on opening day and, although it was nice to see a full auditorium for once, it was slightly confusing to see how many people had brought their children along. Not their older, age-appropriate 12A children, either – their tiny, young toddlers who in all honesty were unlikely to appreciate the intricacies of a film that largely exists to deconstruct feminist iconography. The film was preceded by a trailer for Joy Ride, in which all the characters start singing the line from WAP about all the whores in the house. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen several dozen mums simultaneously panic in the dark, but I’d recommend it.
So what’s causing this spate of awfulness? My guess is our old friend Covid. The lockdowns of 2020, coupled with the film studios’ sudden mania for slinging all their new releases on the nearest streaming platform, stopped people from going to the cinema altogether. Nobody wants to spend several hours sitting shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of strangers in an enclosed space when there’s a fatal virus going around, after all. And it isn’t like people went to the cinema all that much before then either, given the enormous cost of tickets and snacks and drinks and babysitters.
The fact that Barbie is so successful means that, for a huge percentage of its audience, this will be their first cinema visit since 2019. And four years is easily long enough to forget some of the rules. They’re so used to twin-screening during films at home that it seems alien for them to not have their phones in their hands. They’re so used to talking through films at home that it seems unreasonable to be expected to remain silent in a cinema. And when this sort of behaviour meets a wall of people who have spent a considerable amount of money to just enjoy a film, of course violence is going to erupt. It’s like stumbling across an unexploded bomb, or being on a standing room only train next to someone who has their backpack slung in an empty seat. Things are always going to kick off.
The good news is that the wild success of Barbieheimer might have reminded people how much fun it is to go and see a new film in the cinema. Things are rough now, etiquette-wise, but if this has shaken people out of their slumber enough for them to return to cinemas regularly, then it will only be a matter of time before they start obeying the rules once again. The bad news is that Barbieheimers don’t come along every day. Unless The Meg 2 inexplicably ends up becoming a Star Wars-level hit, it might be a while before these people return to the big screen again.
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I really enjoy seeing movies in the theaters, but every time I go, there’s some individual or group that tries their hardest to ruin the experience. The most common is people being on their phones during the movie, I’ve seen it from all age groups, and there’s been a few that really left me wondering why someone spent $20 to see a movie but sat on their phone the whole time. It feels worse after covid, that could just be confirmation bias though.
To be honest, I went to the cinema for the first time after covid last year and thought ‘actually… I have not missed this’. Not because there was any bad behaviour in the audience, but I guess I just found that I didn’t really care about seeing films in cinemas particularly. Maybe I was on an off day, but I think I’ve genuinely gone off going to the cinema.
It probably doesn’t help that the only cinemas near me are multiplex types though. And this article doesn’t exactly encourage me to book seats anytime soon!
This behaviour predates Covid. I remember a few years ago seeing Baby Driver and a girl down the front ws clearly there just to keep her other half happy. He was focused the whole time, she was on her phone as soon as any non-action scene started.
Got to the point I’d take a day off work to see a film and go to the earliest showing to avoid people. I saw Avengers Endgame at 10am with about four people in the cinema, and still one woman had her phone out in the last ten minutes.
People just suck.
I agree it definitely predates COVID, but I do think that COVID has exacerbated the problem quite a bit. Not just in the cinema, but all over the place people are just more… wild or something now? Like people were rude and selfish before, but now they truly do not give a fuck even a little bit.
I wonder if in the future there’ll be a name for it, but COVID definitely did something to us as a society on quite a profound psychological level I think.
It’s not a movie theater problem. It’s generalized. There’s just a higher chance that they expose themselves in settings like that. There’s a an increase of people who don’t even bother to hide they’re assholes.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
An enormous amount has been made lately about Barbie and (to a lesser extent) Oppenheimer reversing the terminal decline of the theatrical cinema experience.
The last few weeks have seen a rash of headlines about a number of regrettable blow-ups that have occurred because people just can’t seem to remember the basic rules of cinema etiquette any more.
Not their older, age-appropriate 12A children, either – their tiny, young toddlers who in all honesty were unlikely to appreciate the intricacies of a film that largely exists to deconstruct feminist iconography.
The lockdowns of 2020, coupled with the film studios’ sudden mania for slinging all their new releases on the nearest streaming platform, stopped people from going to the cinema altogether.
And when this sort of behaviour meets a wall of people who have spent a considerable amount of money to just enjoy a film, of course violence is going to erupt.
Things are rough now, etiquette-wise, but if this has shaken people out of their slumber enough for them to return to cinemas regularly, then it will only be a matter of time before they start obeying the rules once again.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
When I went to watch Oppenheimer, several people used their flash to take pics during the movie, and someone sat in the front row on their phone most of the movie.
Bad bot.
I’m sure it definitely is a problem, but I don’t think I have ever seen any of the phones out during the movie or fights any time I have ever gone to see one.
Then again, the last time I went to a theater (before last Friday to see Oppenheimer) was maybe 2018-2019.
Though I cannot say I’m not guilty of using a phone during a screening, but that was because I absolutely didn’t wanna see the film at all but was dragged along and I just decided to plug in earphones and silently listen to music.
I’ve got news for The Guardian: people have been poorly behaved in movie theaters since at least the late '90s, when I worked in one.
The theater’s solution, started long before I worked there, was an off-duty police officer who worked nights and weekends and would happily escort problem patrons out of the theater and arrest them if necessary.
As a patron, widespread smart phone use (read: addiction) also had a noticeable deleterious effect about a decade later.
But the solution has always been the same: private security who could enforce basic decorum. It was no doubt expensive, but it worked, and it worked well. As an employee, I loved having backup.
Here’s the rub: theaters back then made much more money from any given theatrical release than they do today. Studios began taking a bigger and bigger cut and squeezing theaters out, resulting in theaters having to make nearly all of their proceeds from concessions. That was always a revenue driver, but not in the same way it is today.
Then streaming hit, then Covid… to be honest, it’s a wonder we have any theaters left at this point.
My guess is theaters these days don’t have enough headroom on their balance sheet to afford one or more private security for problem patrons, so they push that potentially dangerous responsibility onto untrained employees instead. As a result, basic rules of decency aren’t enforced, and the 1-4% (depending on the movie) of theater goers who ruin the experience for everyone else go unpunished.