Minecraft moviegoers haven’t been exhibiting the best of behaviours in some instances, and UK cinema chains have issued warnings to rowdy customers.
During the video nasty era, you’d have to go and see something as brilliantly nasty as The Exorcist to find yourself at the epicentre of a good, old-fashioned moral panic. These days, a kids’ movie featuring a cute baby zombie riding a chicken is apparently enough to turn audiences into a screaming, unruly mob.
Reports of crowds attending screenings of A Minecraft Movie behaving badly have been pretty widespread, and according to The Guardian, have led to some UK cinemas issuing warnings to patrons to behave themselves or face the consequences.
Per the report, ‘a number of cinemas in the UK, including Cineworld in Witney, the Radway in Sidmouth and the Reel cinemas in Fareham and Rochdale, have posted notices warning audience members against disrupting screenings of A Minecraft Movie, while the Regent Cinema in Newtown, Wales said it would adopt a “zero-tolerance approach” of stopping screenings if audiences go too far.’
Some cinemas are threatening audiences with the police too, although CIneworld is also attempting the bold strategy of steering such rowdy behaviour into specialised screenings. Imagine mistakenly booking yourself into one of those showings. Yikes, it sounds like that bit in Gremlins, doesn’t it?
Read more: A Minecraft Movie, and why the videogame adaptation curse never existed
All jokes aside, the Cineworld Reddit page has employees trading war stories of the past weekend, and you have to feel for them. Accounts include details such as these: ‘I’ve been working at Cineworld all weekend and we’ve had numerous young teens (mostly boys by far) being a nuisance. Yelling certain lines, being obnoxiously loud in general and worse case they were *spitting* on customers.’
Or this one: ‘it’s been absolute shit for our site this weekend. Grown men threatening to punch teenagers, kids throwing bottles and popcorn around the screens, other kids refusing to leave because we “can’t prove they’ve done anything” – which is true, we can only go based on what the people complaining have told us.’
Hopefully this coming weekend will calm down as TikTok finds something else to feed its algorithm with. If over-exuberant (read badly-behaved) fans don’t dial it back, though, it sounds as though stiffer (blockier?) consequences could be in store for them.
In the meantime, here’s hoping that the current 30th anniversary screenings of Muriel’s Wedding are better behaved.
