Archived version: https://archive.ph/zDSbp

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.