Audience Etiquette and Minecraft Memes.
The biggest movie in the world right now is kind of a mess, but not for the reasons a movie that's based on yet another intellectual property might have you think it is.
Film
I really feel the need to start this with a disclaimer —this isn't about "A Minecraft Movie" as a movie, not its quality, not really its content.
I haven't seen the movie yet, and I'm not sure if I want to check out a screening of it - because whether you've seen it or not, the film has proven as an unmitigated and boisterous success that's great for the box office, but maybe not for anyone else: audience lines streaming up and down the block, disruptive crowds, a live chicken!
Multiplexes worldwide are being treated as messy personal playgrounds for this movie especially, but it's not that there’s a single culprit for this phenomenon. Rather it's up to a great many years of viral memes and unaddressed social needs convulsing on top of each other, and movie theaters are bearing the brunt of it.
Jared Hess’s live action adaptation of the popular video game is on its third weekend of release and still going strong, breaking high box office records for the year so far earning $313 million on its opening and an additional $78.3 million on its second. Yet its demonstrable success has been an absurdly chaotic thing for theaters to keep up with as popcorn rains like vomit in excess and soda streams stickily along the floors. Proponents of a very viral internet meme are going crazy, full on apeshit at screenings at a key moment wherein the character of Steve—portrayed by Jack Black—exclaims “CHICKEN JOCKEY” when a green zombie drops atop a chicken, heralding cries of excitement and laughter and huge, raucous action that rivals even the nastiest midnight movie experience.
In some showings people are up and dancing out of their seats. In others scenes accentuate with banshee shrieks from the seats from moment to moment. In every single one, those theaters are left a disaster for underpaid workers to scrub clean.
And to an extent it makes sense: Minecraft the game was released in and around the rise of a very early internet culture—early YouTube, OG game streamers and Twitch users and Pewdiepie viewers—and it's cultivated a fan base, 200+ million strong, shaped almost entirely by a meme oriented ancestry that I'm not too sure the creative and financial people behind the film adaptation were all that prepared for.
It’s pretty easy to dismiss what's been happening with A Minecraft Movie as part of that simple internet fun, as its own themed participation not unlike 2023’s Barbenheimer or the Wicked movie’s singalongs (certain journalists have done so, Hess and WarnerBros execs eager for profit are quick to encourage it), though I don't think we've reckoned with what lockdown brain rot has done to our idea of community to warrant that right.
Writing for The Guardian, Kate Maltby points out that: “...the dispute lands just as audiences on both sides of the Atlantic are caught up in a feverish debate about post-Covid etiquette at cinemas, theatres and live music events. Producers and investors face the same dilemma. In a sector desperate for bums on seats, how far can they encourage traditional audiences to remember their visit as a participatory event? How far do the construction of “in-person” phenomena alienate existing audiences and disrupt the art itself?”
There's an underlying selfishness to this phenomenon that recalls many years of disregard for plays and musicals (Patti Lupone screaming back at that audience member on the phone will always be famous), and even more in the aftereffects of a public that's been convinced that the pandemic is over now. If anything, it's sort of an extreme logical endpoint of a subtly insidious youth culture chasing for virality; in that it's all for views, or in the 10 year olds buying serums at Sephora. For A Minecraft Movie, social neglect is cross contaminating with a fandom that’d previously only consumed online towards unholy anarchy, projected on a silver screen.
People don't really respect movies anymore. People don't really respect concerts anymore. And if all those celebrity impersonation contests are any indication, the lockdown raised a generation of people, young people in particular, that are starved for genuine, collective human connection with no sense of what it looks like in real life. The third space—between home, work, school—is dead or dying, and what we're witnessing is that slow decline dovetailing hard and fast; the rules of social convention have become alien for a generation without space to cultivate it, and so this manifests in these distorted attempts at community in places not built for it. Like in multiplex movie theaters.
It's important to note disorderly conduct isn’t unheard of at film screenings (literally the gimmick on which midnight movie culture is built on) but then this isn't happening at a midnight movie, it’s at a Regal, an AMC. Going gonzo at A Minecraft Movie is a case of simple fun…but it's not for the theater staff who have to pick up after the popcorn explosions, or for any of audience members—those who aren't involved in the rowdy behavior—who get shuffled out with the rest by fed up managers without a refund, or for anybody who took time out of their day to treat their families to a nice outing and have it ruined by police presence, or physical assaults (which did happen).
In a time of global anti-intellectualism, where people don't feel that they owe themselves to others, civility is more important than ever. Because our social guardrails are reciprocal, and when bad behavior is neglected—by the press, or the director downplaying in saying: "It's funny because I think it's just literally cheering and throwing popcorn, which is so funny to me that cops are getting called for popcorn.”—it metastasizes into worse and worse situations and respect is thrown into the trash. Ignoring nicety ignores your part in the world, and when we can only appreciate life through chaos and memetic havoc, at what point does the red line get crossed?
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