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BAD BEHAVIOR AT ‘BARBENHEIMER’ REFLECTS A WORRYING TREND


DRUNKEN OUTBURSTS, PUBLIC NUDITY AND NONSTOP CELLPHONE USE DISRUPT PACKED
THEATERS. HAVE PEOPLE FORGOTTEN HOW TO GO THE MOVIES?

By Sofia Andrade
and 
Janay Kingsberry
August 5, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

As people return to movie theaters amid the “Barbenheimer” boom, there have been
numerous reports of disruptive behavior. (iStock)

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Ryan Gosling was having a big moment on-screen bro’ing up the Barbie Dreamhouse
as Ken when Tess Connolly, 22, first spotted something amiss.

It was a 9:30 p.m. showing of “Barbie” at the Regal Cinema in downtown Denver,
and the theater’s manager had begun pleading with a man seated a few rows in
front of Connolly and her younger brother. The man, the manager said, needed to
leave. But the moviegoer wouldn’t budge. That’s when five security guards showed
up and Connolly truly took in the spectacle in front of her — and,
unfortunately, it wasn’t Ken shouting “Sublime!”



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“One of the security guards was saying to the guy, ‘Dude, you cannot be naked in
here,’” she recalled. “The guy was all confused and upset that he couldn’t be
naked in the theater … he was getting all worked up.” The security guard
proceeded to ask the audience to assist in 86’ing the man. According to
Connolly, many responded by yelling things like: “Get this freak out of here!”
and “My teenage girls are here!” Meanwhile, “Barbie” kept playing in the
background.

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Though the man was eventually removed from the packed theater, Connolly worries
she may have missed the funniest part of Greta Gerwig’s long-anticipated film.

“It was the moment that we all were going to start dying laughing. And the
security guard was totally ruining our moment, being like, ‘Everybody start
yelling.’ And we were like, ‘No, we’re trying to watch the movie,’” Connolly
said.

“Barbenheimer” — the twin release of blockbusters “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” —
may have broken box office records and brought people out to the theaters in
droves, but it also highlighted a very real problem: Some people seem to have
forgotten how to go to the movies, with widespread reports of drunken outbursts,
rampant cellphone use and exhibitionism.

At a “Barbie” showing at an AMC theater in Washington on Sunday, a man wearing a
pink tank top and body glitter loudly identified with the Kens on-screen.
Throughout the film — and despite multiple shushes — he would cheer, sing or
stand up and pump his fist from his front-section seat whenever the Kens rallied
against the Barbies. He apologized to the audience at one point, explaining that
he was “wasted” but nevertheless continued disrupting the show until the film’s
climax, at which point he got into a slap fight with an acquaintance sitting
beside him. (A representative for AMC did not immediately respond to a request
for comment.)



Online, stories of unruly or otherwise disrespectful guests at screenings over
the past few weeks have gone viral. In one particularly memorable video from
what appears to be a “Barbie” screening in Brazil, a woman violently pushes
another woman to the floor. The ensuing fight plays out as Billie Eilish’s
“Barbie” song (“I used to float, now I just fall down”) plays in the background.

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The bad behavior wasn’t limited to energized “Barbie” audiences, either: “Saw
‘Oppenheimer’ last night in one of the worst behaved crowds I’ve ever been in,
multiple camera flashes throughout, people in front of us scrolling TikTok half
way thru the film,” user @silvergelpen wrote this weekend on Twitter, which has
recently been renamed X. “If you don’t have the attention span for a 3 hour
movie don’t leave the house to attend one.”

Cardi B is the latest celebrity to have something thrown at her during a live
performance in 2023. Harry Styles, Kelsea Ballerini and others have also been
hit. (Video: Allie Caren/The Washington Post)

Others soon chimed in with their own experiences: loud talking, disruptive
entering-and-exiting the theater, bursts of laughter at inappropriate moments
and videos taken with flash of scenes with the potential for TikTok virality.

The mayhem isn’t limited to movie theaters. The past year has seen a disturbing
trend of audience members throwing objects at musicians onstage. Over on
Broadway, an unruly woman halted a performance of “Death of a Salesman” back in
December, while a controversial Playbill exposé from the spring detailed
aggression toward ushers and other theater workers, who reported being spat on
and screamed at regularly. Not even the skies are safe: This week, an American
Airlines pilot went viral for lecturing “selfish and rude” passengers on
airplane behavior (“Nobody wants to hear your video”).

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Nobody’s quite figured out where everyone’s good manners have gone — and what is
exactly causing the current collapse in civility.

Roxane Cohen Silver, a professor of psychology at the University of California,
Irvine, and an expert on stress and personal trauma, says this behavior could be
linked to a string of recent events.

“It is clear that the past three years have been challenging for many people in
our country. We have experienced a series of collective traumas, cascading one
to the next, which for many has been almost too much to bear. The combination of
the pandemic, inflation, mass shootings, climate-related disasters, political
polarization and so on, has taxed our capacity to cope,” Cohen Silver said in an
email. “It is important to recognize this reality as we examine behavior this
summer.”

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Others are calling out cellphone culture and a constant, self-centered need for
stimulation. “For the entire history of theaters people were able to pay
attention. The only difference now is the phones,” tweeted NBC news tech and
culture reporter Kat Tenbarge.

When Brandon Thint, 24, went to see “Barbie” at a Cinemark in Austin, the last
20 minutes of the movie were spoiled for him by younger kids watching YouTube
videos near the front of the theater at full volume during “the emotional climax
of the movie.”

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Viviana Freyer, 21, had a similar experience at her opening night “Oppenheimer”
screening in Miami. While she was excited to see the new Christopher Nolan epic
on 70mm film, the experience quickly soured when a group of “really rowdy
teenagers” talked through the entire movie, having loud reactions to “moments
where you were not supposed to be that loud.”

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“I do understand that ‘Barbenheimer’ is the first sort of big movie event in a
very long time, and people are excited about the movies, and a lot of these
people who are causing this ruckus are young and are participating in the
‘Barbenheimer’ trend,” Freyer said. “But … I do think the recent trend of
super-interactive superhero movies combined with the internet and TikTok has
kind of made this cocktail for rowdy behavior at the movies.”

The behavior she witnessed, she said, is encouraged by blockbuster Marvel
movies, for example, where time for audience reactions to plot twists and
surprise characters is built into the film itself. “‘Oppenheimer’ of all movies
is not meant to be a spectator sport kind of experience,” she said.

Movie theater policies, in the meantime, are serving as a final line of defense
for film fans frustrated by their seat neighbors’ outbursts.

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At Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, a dine-in theater chain known for its strictly
enforced “no talking, no texting” policy, guests can discreetly flag unruly
behavior by raising an order card to alert staff.

“We’re not going to see every single thing that happens and how disruptive it is
to you and your guest, so we do rely on that kind of communication,” said
Michael Pieri, an executive general manager who oversees two Alamo locations in
the D.C. area.

He says the system has been working well. “The only times that I’ve really seen
hesitation is when it’s somebody who’s breaking the rules right next to you,”
Pieri said, explaining that some guests might feel uncomfortable reporting the
behavior in front of the person. The most common violations he notices at his
locations pertain to Alamo’s late policy, which prohibits guests from arriving
15 minutes after the posted showtime.



In the weeks since “Barbenheimer” opened in theaters, Pieri said there have
certainly been more violations of Alamo’s talking and texting policy, “but
that’s because there’s more bodies in the building.”

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But Alamo did make some exceptions for the release of “Barbie.” Both of Pieri’s
venues hosted “Barbie” slumber party viewings where people were encouraged to
show up in pajamas. Those events, he said, are what “we call our ‘rowdy
screenings’ [with] relaxed policies where we encourage people to kind of talk a
little bit.”

“The biggest issue is you can only be so prepared,” said Pieri, noting how
earnings for “Barbie” far exceeded box office expectations. “When it
exponentially blows up like that, there’s only so much preparation you can do.”

Asking a disruptive person to stop or raising the issue to theater workers isn’t
a foolproof method, either. (And the offending party can react with even more
disruption, as appeared to be the case in the Brazil theater.)

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When Abby Luca, 19, attended a regular Alamo Drafthouse screening of “Barbie” in
Yonkers, N.Y., she said her experience was ruined by a visibly drunk group of
women who spent the entirety of the movie dancing, having conversations with the
on-screen characters and making other loud noises. Though several in the theater
asked the women to be quiet, and “the security went over to them, like maybe
four times” to tell them they would be kicked out, they received only warnings.

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“It was extremely distracting, honestly,” Luca said, adding that she worries she
may have missed crucial parts of the film. “I feel like there were details that
we didn’t even get, and stuff that I’ve seen posted that I didn’t catch onto.”

Her experience at the theater was so disrupted that she plans to see “Barbie”
again. A spokesperson for Alamo Drafthouse told The Washington Post there was no
record of the incident, adding, “We have not seen an uptick in disruptive
audience behavior for ‘Barbie’ and ‘Oppenheimer’ screenings.”

Luca said that she didn’t ask for a refund because she “felt bad” for the
employees.

“I used to be an avid shusher. Now, I choose my battles because I don’t want to
get stabbed in a movie theater,” said Justin Chang, a film critic for the Los
Angeles Times and NPR’s “Fresh Air.” After having to ask moviegoers to wear
their masks at the height of the pandemic, distracting phones seemed less
pressing: “People’s habits were bad before the pandemic. They were bad [during]
the pandemic wave, and they’re bad now … It’s always bad, so I do choose to pick
my battles now. I just get desensitized to it.”

Similarly, when someone seated next to Alex West, 28, started browsing through
Instagram for much of “Barbie,” he simply chose to ignore them. “At this point
it’s just something you get used to … especially in a packed theater,” said
West.

In the end, the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon, said Chang, is “an interesting kind
of litmus test.” Maybe, he said, the live tweeting, filming and talking during
movie screenings — “all these things that are so incredibly disturbing,
disrespectful and distracting to moviegoers” — are just the way people engage
with films now.

“People acting as if a public space is their living room is a problem that
affects all of us,” he said, “not just [in] movie theaters.”

Avi Selk contributed to this report.

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