Cinema patrons sound off with their most bizarre theater experiences

The #GentleMinions phenomenon proves that you can never really know what’s going to happen on a trip to the theater. Most times you’ll just be sitting in a darkened room with a well-behaved audience, but invariably there are experiences where it all goes to hell. Whether it be unruly patrons, weird technical glitches, or pranksters out to have some fun — the most memorable trips to the multiplex often have nothing to do with the movie itself.

Reddit users are currently running down their “most bizarre cinema experiences” and there are some doozies on the list. The OP recounts a man appearing to have some kind of psychotic break while watching Joker, people getting down n’ dirty during The Gentlemen, and getting whacked in the face with a falling phone. But all that’s vanilla in comparison to some of these tales from the dark side of the multiplex.

The replies are something else, though, with the top-voted saying that during Scream 2, he was menaced by someone in a Ghostface costume and no one believed him. Another notes the unbelievable quantities of food left behind after the first Minions movie, including “a KFC bucket containing a giant Ziploc bag full of spaghetti (sauce and all)”, and someone being woken up by security for snoring too loudly during a movie.

Then there are the technical problems. One of the best in the thread comes during March of the Penguins: when Morgan Freeman solemnly says that the Antarctic winters are pitch black, and the projector bulb promptly blew. It took a minute or two for the audience not to realize the black screen wasn’t an artistic decision. Or perhaps the celluloid actually caught fire during Agent Cody Banks and the young audience thought it was the villain burning up.

But perhaps the grossest comes from a theater employee, who reports that after screenings of Magic Mike they regularly found cucumbers abandoned on the floor. Uh, we’ll let you put two and two together on that.