Question for frequent movie-goers: is this a trend in general, or just an artifact of Barbenheimer being a social media phenomenon? (All of the anecdotes in the article come from the two movies)
The evidence given that it is a trend, pre-show prods to turn off your phone, feels like it has been happening as long as personal cell phones were a thing.
Those prods have existed since phones, but it was previously about not having a ringtone blare out. Now the backlash is against people scrolling tiktok/whatever during a movie. I haven't been to a movie theatre in a while so I can't say if it's a phenomenon but that would be infuriating
On a tangent, those two are titles that i'll never see even if they stream on something i subscribe to, because the enormous hype has completely put me off.
It's been a problem since smartphones became widespread and people got addicted to them. And quite frankly the theater workers don't get paid enough to enforce the rules.
Just one of many reasons going to movies isn't really worth it anymore, unless you're really in the mindset you want to go and having lights shining / jostling around in your peripheral vision won't annoy you.
Yeah for any movies where that happened usually the people around them doing it corrected the behavior. One movie ages ago when cell was sort of new a dude just flipped the bad boy open and bragged about how he was at a movie and talking on the phone openly. The rain of popcorn and m&m's shut him down fairly quickly. 'dude turn it off' 'whatever' candy rain. Sort of sucked for me as I was a couple of rows in front of the guy and everyone's aim was not exact. That was almost 20 years ago.
I’m trying to get my young daughter into the movies and have seen quite a few this year.
We see movies a couple weeks after their release and go mid-week (a 7pm-ish show after I’m done with work). Often the theater is empty. When there have been people nobody used a cell phone or did behavior that was distracting. (BTW bringing a 4yr old to the movies usually means we are the annoying group, like when my daughter singing the songs in the Little Mermaid.)
So my guess is that this behavior is likely limited to opening weekends at popular movies where telling someone you were there by posting a photo on social media is part of the experience for them.
It is just an artifact of the WSJ complaining about "kids these days". In the past, the WSJ has whined about the internet, television, rock & roll, radio and telephones.
I read the WSJ "whining" as more of an observation about evolving social trends than anything else. The world changes, people notice, and journalists write about it - do you feel clever noting that the WSJ has, in the past, written about other evolving trends?
Circling it all into just "kids these days" type discourse is pretty reductive and reddit-brained, I think.
I went to the new mission Impossible on the Sunday that barbenheimer came out. Well behaved, mostly full audience. I saw a phone come out once, briefly
I go to movies somewhat often and the issue is far more common than it used to be. Oddly, it isn’t constant. Sometimes, you see a film and everyone is well behaved. Other times, people are terrible. I’ve found little reason for it.
- Fewer people are going to movies, so the people which are left hold different preferences
- Changing demographics
- potentially just a youth culture thing. I don't know what young people are up to these days, but _more_ phone use in inappropriate situations certainly doesn't sound surprising
It might be a self enforcing feedback loop. If people that are annoying think annoying behavoiur is OK to a greater extent (watch phones, talk to the screen or others etc), as the audience get more annoying, they are not driven away to the same degree and the problem gets worse.
Young people have always been loud and disruptive. I think it has something to do with their brain development.
And put 20 of them together in a enclosed venue and there's chaos.
The difference is that back in the day, harmful/disruptive behavior was merely "fun", where as nowadays it's actually profitable thanks to social media.
Back in the day people would grow out of it, now they have no incentive to if they actually gain money (from ads) or notoriety from doing it.
I has gotten way worse since I was a kid or 20s. And don't quote Aristoteles on me. I wouldn't even say kids are the problem. Rather some self-identified low class culture.
youth culture is shifting a bit due to how early many kids get their first screen, or cellular modem.
“acting out” is age “appropriate” and is nothing new, but social media has caused a form of escalation.
where once you might have heard rumors of that brash young man that did the wild thing a few towns over, and happened to survive, now there are “celebrities” that have built entire careers off of their initial public stupidity, and droves of youths eager to follow in their footsteps. because it might be lucrative, or at least cool.
potentially just a youth culture thing. I don't know what young people are up to these days, but _more_ phone use in inappropriate situations certainly doesn't sound surprising
In my experience, inappropriate device use is definitely NOT just a "youth" thing.
it is annoying and has been for a while. wouldn't even consider visiting a movie during opening week or anything even remotely mainstream. but even then you can have bad luck. i'm super easily offended by disrespectful behavior. for a while i vaped some (very small amount of) weed. that would sedate me comfortably and i wouldn't care about the plebs. also made a lot of movies more interesting. same with concerts. it's unbelievably annoying to have a majority of the audience filming with screen on full brightness - many people don't even seem to know you can dim the display. but even with my sensitivities you can still go to the movies or concerts - but you have to be a bit more selective about when and where.
It’s not just movie theatres, it’s just what makes in noticeable.
The sub-minute endorphin loops that the attention economy has created have created a subclass of dependent people that are incapable of feeling well without constant interaction with their devices.
It’s addiction in its most classical presentation. We have effectively removed a huge slice of the population from the pool of potentially productive thought in favor of candy crush and ads.
Unfortunately, those people, though they now contribute less than they otherwise would to a functioning society, still consume the same (or even more) resources.
This is one of the many externalised costs of the attention economy and we are all poorer for it.
We should consider the option to liquidate companies that derive their profits from the erosion of cultural resources and at the cost public well being.
The health, societal, and socioeconomic implications of tight endorphin loops are well known, yet we continue to tolerate the pushers, saying it’s the parents or the individuals responsibility (it is, but still, should we tolerate companies that seek to do harm to people for profit?)
I rather have phones in a movie than popcorn. Having people next to you stuffing their faces with smelly greasy popcorn is the most disgusting and annoying behavior in a theater. The smell, the sound of the bag, the chewing and the licking of the greasy fingers, nothing is better at ruining a movie than that.
Last time I went to see a film there were only about ten people, and yet I had the twin delights of a phone screen on full brightness and sweet wrappers rustling constantly.
I do agree that crinkly candy wrappers and noisy chips in a movie are annoying, but not extremely so.
But I do get irrationally angry when people talk during movies - to a degree that makes it impossible for me to watch MST3k[0] at all. I like the premise, the jokes are funny etc - but I just can't tolerate people talking over a movie :D
Nah, I think I just dislike humans behaving like pigs. There must be some strong correlation between buying large buttery bags of popcorn and manners on the table. I would also be annoyed if I was sitting next to people like that in a restaurant talking and chewing with their mouth full, eating with their hands or dropping utensils on the plate, but the proximity in the theater and the length of the movie makes it so much worse (those XL bags and large sodas can last two hours). I rarely go to the theaters in the US anymore for that reason, people in general are just gross, perhaps in other countries is different.
Yeah this is like an emperor has no clothes situation to me. Between the hot "butter" smell and the way people eat, it's pretty gross. Plain popcorn doesn't bother me.
> Go to niche theaters. The non-profit place with the weird snacks is likely filled with movie buffs.
> Go to classic movies you missed the first time around.
YMMV.
I did this in a nice little theater with a single room. They didn't even sell any kind of snack, just drinks, if that. Went to see an older movie, but a fairly long one (children of paradise). It was a nicer day, too, so not one where people didn't have much else to do.
Cue a bunch of insufferable twats eating a truckload of chips during the whole show, complete with the noisy bags and everything.
ArcLight in SoCal was the best movie viewing experience I've ever had. My wife and I, when we were dating, would go to opening nights probably a dozen times a year for different movies. It was 18+, reserved seating, and they had strict policies about disturbing the movie and would enforce them very quickly, with employees standing in the theater for the duration of the movie. Sadly, they went out of business (the pandemic crushed them) and I am not sure that anything has really replaced them.
Actually, it looks like the one in Sherman Oaks has survived relatively tact under new management (now known as The Culver Theater) but I haven't been so cant comment on the experience.
I took a PTO day to see Oppenheimer mid-week. Another colleague did the same. We both have young kids, so getting to the movies is a heavy lift. We live pretty close to each other and there is a theater about a mile from my house. We decided that we'd definitely do it again for the right movies.
I fully agree with this. I don't love their skyrocketing food prices, but I'll still choose to go there for any movie I care about. I know for certain people there won't be disruptive.
Which is weird, because the original Alamo, down by 6th street, was pretty notorious for the roughhousing of its patrons — although, this was in the late 90s. We still go to the Slaughter & Lamar locations, and it really is a different crowd.
I saw Oppenheimer at Alamo with movie-talkers and cell-users next to me, and they still put the entirety of the onus on the customer to report the bad actors. I don't know how I thought they'd do it, but I was sufficiently put off by the prospect of considering myself a Karen that I didn't (also the latent fear that the server would take my ticket, read it, and immediately turn to the people next to me and tell them I reported them)
> “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”
-Socrates
This isn’t a new problem. Every generation believes the next generation is shite.
I don't think it's a problem with young people, I think it's caused by the customer-first mentality (and also reducing labor), which makes theaters reluctant to throw out misbehaving people, and also allow them to bring food. In other words, it's done for profit, so it's something WSJ should celebrate.
Sounds like partial blame can be assigned to head empty smooth brain tiktok clout-seekers who don't _usually_ go to the movies, but are going en masse because TT, same thing with the grimace shake BS.
Gen z doesn't understand how fucking easy it is to market to them - all Macca's had to do is seed a tiktok meme where you drink a grimace shake and then something terrible happens and BAM, tens of thousands of sales or more just bc these people want to post "their version" of the same damn thing to their TT. Let alone half of TT just seems to be "look this things looks cool buy it buy it".
As the article points out things like this (at concerts etc too) have been on the rise but I would find it interesting to determine what the main source of it is. I think it's the same poison as Vine (on which people also did stupid "prank" stuff for clout) but TT seems to have a much larger audience than Vine ever did.
But I think TT is just magnifying a larger, more human problem: there are some on TT that denounce the bad behaviour, but the majority of people seem to be like "ha ha is funi" when watching a video of some TT'er walking up to someone and assaulting them "it's just a prank bro". Ugh.
> But I think TT is just magnifying a larger, more human problem: there are some on TT that denounce the bad behaviour, but the majority of people seem to be like "ha ha is funi" when watching a video of some TT'er walking up to someone and assaulting them "it's just a prank bro". Ugh.
The biggest problem is that TT is controlled by China - a nation that's classified in Western countries as anything between dangerous to outright enemy, depending on whom you ask. China has no incentive to invest into moderation more than absolutely required by laws (e.g. German NetzDG), but a political incentive to have Western nations fractured - and promoting antisocial behaviour is a pretty good way to do that.
> China has no incentive to invest into moderation more than absolutely required by laws
This is no different to any other Western-based social networks? None of them have any incentive to go beyond the bare minimum, especially considering bordeline/offensive/etc content actually generates the most engagement.
The problem is that we just don't have strong enough legislation to discourage harmful content - because back in the day, nobody thought to legislate against it because nobody thought it would be profitable to actually host & encourage production of various harmful/fake/divisive content at scale.
Revoking section 230 protection from any platform that uses opaque algorithms to promote content to increase "engagement" would solve this problem. It would offer them a choice of either being a common carrier, sorting all content by some primitive metric such as user's explicit preferences or chronological timeline (thus no way to promote harmful content that happens to be more profitable), or become an editor in which they can algorithmically choose the content they promote but then they become liable for it (thus forcing them to moderate very well).
> This is no different to any other Western-based social networks? None of them have any incentive to go beyond the bare minimum, especially considering bordeline/offensive/etc content actually generates the most engagement.
Facebook, Twitter/X etc. all can be grabbed by Western courts. Tiktok can just choose to ignore court rulings and summons, just as Telegram does with German legal issues, and continue to operate with impunity because we don't have the balls to do it - unlike China, Turkey, Iran or Indonesia who have zero problems just ordering domain blocks at their telcos.
> Facebook, Twitter/X etc. all can be grabbed by Western courts
Have we tried to (whether for TikTok or the western equivalents)? As far as I know there is no political will to meaningfully rein those companies in because the politicians in power also rely on their misinformation potential and don't want to bite the hand that feeds/brings votes and misleads voters towards them.
TikTok has local subsidiaries in most jurisdictions through which they run their advertising business, which is just as vulnerable to court orders as its western competitors. If push comes to shove, their ability to accept payment from the West can be significantly curtailed which will put a major damper on their advertising business.
The concerns around TikTok evading western law enforcement is FUD that allows to divert the conversation towards a convenient scapegoat (China) instead of addressing the root cause that there's incompetence/unwillingness to actually act on the harmful effects of social media platforms, Chinese and Western.
> The concerns around TikTok evading western law enforcement is FUD that allows to divert the conversation towards a convenient scapegoat (China) instead of addressing the root cause that there's incompetence/unwillingness to actually act on the harmful effects of social media platforms, Chinese and Western.
We are regulating them, at least in Europe, with German NetzDG and the upcoming EU DSA/DMA regulations.
66 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadThe evidence given that it is a trend, pre-show prods to turn off your phone, feels like it has been happening as long as personal cell phones were a thing.
https://theface.com/culture/why-are-theatre-audiences-gettin...
On a tangent, those two are titles that i'll never see even if they stream on something i subscribe to, because the enormous hype has completely put me off.
Just one of many reasons going to movies isn't really worth it anymore, unless you're really in the mindset you want to go and having lights shining / jostling around in your peripheral vision won't annoy you.
We see movies a couple weeks after their release and go mid-week (a 7pm-ish show after I’m done with work). Often the theater is empty. When there have been people nobody used a cell phone or did behavior that was distracting. (BTW bringing a 4yr old to the movies usually means we are the annoying group, like when my daughter singing the songs in the Little Mermaid.)
So my guess is that this behavior is likely limited to opening weekends at popular movies where telling someone you were there by posting a photo on social media is part of the experience for them.
Circling it all into just "kids these days" type discourse is pretty reductive and reddit-brained, I think.
- Fewer people are going to movies, so the people which are left hold different preferences
- Changing demographics
- potentially just a youth culture thing. I don't know what young people are up to these days, but _more_ phone use in inappropriate situations certainly doesn't sound surprising
Back in the day people would grow out of it, now they have no incentive to if they actually gain money (from ads) or notoriety from doing it.
“acting out” is age “appropriate” and is nothing new, but social media has caused a form of escalation.
where once you might have heard rumors of that brash young man that did the wild thing a few towns over, and happened to survive, now there are “celebrities” that have built entire careers off of their initial public stupidity, and droves of youths eager to follow in their footsteps. because it might be lucrative, or at least cool.
In my experience, inappropriate device use is definitely NOT just a "youth" thing.
The sub-minute endorphin loops that the attention economy has created have created a subclass of dependent people that are incapable of feeling well without constant interaction with their devices.
It’s addiction in its most classical presentation. We have effectively removed a huge slice of the population from the pool of potentially productive thought in favor of candy crush and ads.
Unfortunately, those people, though they now contribute less than they otherwise would to a functioning society, still consume the same (or even more) resources.
This is one of the many externalised costs of the attention economy and we are all poorer for it.
We should consider the option to liquidate companies that derive their profits from the erosion of cultural resources and at the cost public well being.
The health, societal, and socioeconomic implications of tight endorphin loops are well known, yet we continue to tolerate the pushers, saying it’s the parents or the individuals responsibility (it is, but still, should we tolerate companies that seek to do harm to people for profit?)
I do agree that crinkly candy wrappers and noisy chips in a movie are annoying, but not extremely so.
But I do get irrationally angry when people talk during movies - to a degree that makes it impossible for me to watch MST3k[0] at all. I like the premise, the jokes are funny etc - but I just can't tolerate people talking over a movie :D
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_Science_Theater_3000
Makes me wonder if people actually care about the movie at all.
Go early in the morning. The 10:00 am Sunday showing of Oppenheimer is likely full of movie buffs.
Go midweek. An emptier theater reduces the impact of phone screens if someone uses one.
Go to nicer theaters with higher numbers of staff.
Go to niche theaters. The non-profit place with the weird snacks is likely filled with movie buffs.
Go to classic movies you missed the first time around.
> Go to classic movies you missed the first time around.
YMMV.
I did this in a nice little theater with a single room. They didn't even sell any kind of snack, just drinks, if that. Went to see an older movie, but a fairly long one (children of paradise). It was a nicer day, too, so not one where people didn't have much else to do.
Cue a bunch of insufferable twats eating a truckload of chips during the whole show, complete with the noisy bags and everything.
Actually, it looks like the one in Sherman Oaks has survived relatively tact under new management (now known as The Culver Theater) but I haven't been so cant comment on the experience.
Two empty seats to both sides, one empty row in front and back.
Zero groups of teenagers or loud people, just movie buffs or people who want to watch a movie in peace.
[0] https://twitter.com/robertlagrant/status/609373147310256128
This isn’t a new problem. Every generation believes the next generation is shite.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/
Gen z doesn't understand how fucking easy it is to market to them - all Macca's had to do is seed a tiktok meme where you drink a grimace shake and then something terrible happens and BAM, tens of thousands of sales or more just bc these people want to post "their version" of the same damn thing to their TT. Let alone half of TT just seems to be "look this things looks cool buy it buy it".
As the article points out things like this (at concerts etc too) have been on the rise but I would find it interesting to determine what the main source of it is. I think it's the same poison as Vine (on which people also did stupid "prank" stuff for clout) but TT seems to have a much larger audience than Vine ever did.
But I think TT is just magnifying a larger, more human problem: there are some on TT that denounce the bad behaviour, but the majority of people seem to be like "ha ha is funi" when watching a video of some TT'er walking up to someone and assaulting them "it's just a prank bro". Ugh.
The biggest problem is that TT is controlled by China - a nation that's classified in Western countries as anything between dangerous to outright enemy, depending on whom you ask. China has no incentive to invest into moderation more than absolutely required by laws (e.g. German NetzDG), but a political incentive to have Western nations fractured - and promoting antisocial behaviour is a pretty good way to do that.
And for Russia, of course.
This is no different to any other Western-based social networks? None of them have any incentive to go beyond the bare minimum, especially considering bordeline/offensive/etc content actually generates the most engagement.
The problem is that we just don't have strong enough legislation to discourage harmful content - because back in the day, nobody thought to legislate against it because nobody thought it would be profitable to actually host & encourage production of various harmful/fake/divisive content at scale.
Revoking section 230 protection from any platform that uses opaque algorithms to promote content to increase "engagement" would solve this problem. It would offer them a choice of either being a common carrier, sorting all content by some primitive metric such as user's explicit preferences or chronological timeline (thus no way to promote harmful content that happens to be more profitable), or become an editor in which they can algorithmically choose the content they promote but then they become liable for it (thus forcing them to moderate very well).
Facebook, Twitter/X etc. all can be grabbed by Western courts. Tiktok can just choose to ignore court rulings and summons, just as Telegram does with German legal issues, and continue to operate with impunity because we don't have the balls to do it - unlike China, Turkey, Iran or Indonesia who have zero problems just ordering domain blocks at their telcos.
Have we tried to (whether for TikTok or the western equivalents)? As far as I know there is no political will to meaningfully rein those companies in because the politicians in power also rely on their misinformation potential and don't want to bite the hand that feeds/brings votes and misleads voters towards them.
TikTok has local subsidiaries in most jurisdictions through which they run their advertising business, which is just as vulnerable to court orders as its western competitors. If push comes to shove, their ability to accept payment from the West can be significantly curtailed which will put a major damper on their advertising business.
The concerns around TikTok evading western law enforcement is FUD that allows to divert the conversation towards a convenient scapegoat (China) instead of addressing the root cause that there's incompetence/unwillingness to actually act on the harmful effects of social media platforms, Chinese and Western.
We are regulating them, at least in Europe, with German NetzDG and the upcoming EU DSA/DMA regulations.
Yeah, sitting on your loud phone and not watching the movie is just strange, of course.
But when everyone else is engaged with the movie, it's a better experience to me.