Moviegoing as an experience has had its rough periods of adjustment over the decades.
Audiences returning to the cinema in the ’70s and ’80s thanks to the Blockbuster era had to learn they weren’t in their den, where chattering about what was on TV was the rule. I spent most of the ’80s lecturing senior citizens and pissant teens about talking talking talking during movies.
Later, I took to tossing the caps from my cheap pens at yakkers, to the point where it got so I didn’t have a single note-taking pen with a clip on it.
And then the cell phone arrived and any semblence of courtesy for those around you went right out the door. Tossing pen caps or popcorn seemed futile. I distinctly remember a showing of “Boogie Nights” at the Beverly Center that was disrupted when a patron took a call, mid-movie, got screamed at and then sat slack-jawed as an enraged fellow moviegoer grabbed their cell and hurled it against the wall.
Any regular moviegoer knows that there are differences between audiences, even if sweeping generalizations can seem harder to back up when you actually crunch the numbers and measure them against your own experience.
Octane Seating is a movie seat seller-distributor that commissioned a poll for “most obnoxous moviegoers,” and other behavioral quirks of the broader cinema audience. Here’s what they found.
- 34% say horror movies have the rowdiest crowds, while documentaries have the calmest.
- 62% admit to intimacy in theaters, including 1 in 25 who’ve had sex.
- 41% have yelled at someone during a movie (mostly over phones, chatter, or couples getting handsy).
- 81% sneak food and drinks into movies.
- 39% show up drunk or high (rising to 50% among Gen Z)
- 21% have filmed another moviegoer to mock them, with some posting it online.
- 1 in 10 have had food or drinks thrown at them during a screening.
Not really my experience of the horror audience. They are typically younger, but I can’t say that’s necessarily a guarantee for “obnoxious” behavior. I’m hard-pressed to recall a really bad horror moviegoing experience.
Sex in the cinema? “Fargo,” NYC, the row behind me at one of the big stadium multiplexes in midtown for a midnight show.
Yelling? Been there, done that. Top tip, start with a polite “Shhhh.” Escalate it to a nuclear “SHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH” before the shouting.
I once did that to a couple who turned out to be colleagues from the newspaper where I was working. They were…chastened.
Sneaking food and drinks? It’s a must, with AMC charging $9 for a drink or a popcorn or a candy box.
“Drunk or high?” Yeah, GenZ owns that. For now.
But for all that can go wrong, the movies are still, by and large, a positive experience, despite the ever-increasing number of ads parked in front of the previews, the prices and the “hell is other people” potential.
Still, if you’ve heard and seen cell phones at funeral services, endured earbud “conversations” by clueless cretins in most any public space you can imagine — museums, concerts, etc. — singling out movies as the one place where that happens is fair.
And speaking as someone who still sees 125+ films a year in cinemas, I know it’s easiest to lump the horror crowd into a “not like the rest of us” generalization. Anime cultists, superhero movie lemmings, every audience has its uncouth outliers.
At least Adam Sandler’s been segregated to Netflix. That crowd might have been the least civilized of all, if memory serves.
