Let the Children Scream
Why not harness the Minecraft-fueled, meme-addled energy bringing real live young people into theaters?
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I’m not familiar with the video game Minecraft, but I had a free afternoon this past weekend, and as I’m wont to do with my childless privilege of abundant time, I popped a magic mushroom square, went to the movies, and grabbed a ticket for the next available showing, which just so happened to be A Minecraft Movie. At the time, I was only ambiently aware of the unrest the film was fomenting in theaters across North America. I assumed it was Gentleminion-adjacent, daffy but peripheral, and thus I went in expecting to vibe out. So you can imagine how my brain, consciousness already altered, was blown into a whole other astral plane when Jack Black yelled the now fateful line — “CHICKEN JOCKEY!!”, a reference to a rare in-game occurrence that appeared in the trailer that became a meme that became a Manchurian Candidate password — and sent the room around me, filled with teens and tweens and a smattering of adults, into sheer pandemonium. Globs of people shot up and roared. Fistfuls of popcorn rose to the skies like geysers. The air exploded with electricity. I saw colors, I saw lights. It was the most visceral experience I’ve had at the movies since Terrifier 3, a movie where a killer clown literally forces rats down people’s throats.
As it turns out, the bedlam in my screening was mild. Since A Minecraft Movie’s release last week, word of tumult across North American theaters has come out in a steady trickle, like scattered reports of a zombie outbreak. The kids, they say, are out of control, precipitated by a social media-fueled desire to create meme-able spectacles. TikTok is peppered with videos of carnage at the movie theaters: huge bags of popcorn exploding across aisles, oceans of bodies roiling up and down, rolls of toilet paper flying from seats C2 to K14, boys being escorted by police out of screening rooms. One teen apparently snuck a live chicken into a showing. A theater in Township, New Jersey has reportedly banned unaccompanied minors from seeing the movie. “If your son was at Township Theatre last night, we strongly encourage you to have a conversation with him about his behavior,” its management wrote on social media.
“It’s fraught with disaster,” says Ken Charko, the acting president of Motion Picture Theater Association in British Columbia who owns a single-screen independent theater in Dunbar, a quiet neighborhood in Vancouver. While he says they haven’t been hit as hard as the bigger chains downtown, “there have been incidents,” including an instance where his staff preemptively removed a teen who was planning to sow chaos. How did they know the kid was up to shenanigans? “It’s obvious when they come in with their own Costco-sized amounts of toilet paper.” In general, theater operators straddle a tricky line with A Minecraft Movie. On the one hand, in light of the live-action Snow White not being the family hit it needed to be, and amid general film industry anxieties over teens being more interested in anything but the movies, the runaway meme-juiced success of A Minecraft Movie has been a great shot in the arm. (It’s grossed a global $550 million so far.) On the other hand, the teenage tumult carries tremendous financial risk. “Things that happen on TikTok are uncontrollable,” Charko tells me. “The damage they could have done could be in the tens of thousands. If that toilet paper roll breaks the screen, fixing it can take a theater down for a couple of days.”
These concerns are totally understandable. At the same time: isn’t such spectacle what we want for the movies? Theater operators just spent another Cinemacon cycle wondering what it’s going to take to draw audiences back into their screening rooms. Lengthen the theatrical window? Of course. Further lux out the seats? Sure. Add pickleball courts? Why the hell not. But here we have a naturally occurring phenomenon that’s actually bringing flesh-and-blood young people to their local temples of cinema, who want to partake in the communal feeling that movie advocates have long touted as being central to the experience. Surely there’s a more productive response than reflexively trying to quash that energy. “It’s weird when you’re having too much fun and the cops get called,” Jared Hess, the movie’s director, told Entertainment Weekly. Black feels the same way, recently making a surprise appearance at a screening where he made fun of all the pearl-clutching. “No throwing popcorn! And absolutely no chicken jockeys!” he yelled, basking in the adoration.
Indeed, going to the movies expressly to go buck wild should have a valid place in the spectrum of theater-going experiences. “It was so delightful,” one parent of a seven-year-old told me about their Minecraft showing, which featured hooting and hollering but not much popcorn projectile. “How often do kids get to go apeshit not just on a playdate?” She did feel bad for theater employees who, armed with large trash bags and leaf blowers, had to hobble in as the credits rolled to clean up the mess. “Not that I wish that for them, but as a parent, it’s nice you don’t have to pick shit off the floor for once,” she added.
The Chicken Jockey outbreak isn’t so far away from the last time theaters were under siege by rowdy youths. When the Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour movie hit the circuit in 2023, there were similarly tsk-tsking responses to unruly young girls throwing theaters into chaos as they bolted to the front to sing and dance before the screen. Some reacted to such scenes with horror, but this kind of fervor should be encouraged. Even institutionalized: think props, costumes, special prices on jumbo bags of popcorn. Get a Jack Black-lookalike to hype the room. (And protect the peace-seeking patrons, perhaps, by isolating them with dedicated quiet screenings.) If Warner Bros. plays its cards right, A Minecraft Movie could truly be the next Rocky Horror Picture Show, the longest-running theatrical release in cinema history and a cornerstone in participatory film-going culture.
Of course, all this should happen within reason. I’m absolutely sympathetic to the potential for costly damages, and to the plight of the exhausted theater employees (who should be paid more anyway), and to the horror endured by the poor live chicken that got smuggled into the theater. But there are ways to do this right. Already there are reports of some theaters planning dedicated “Chicken Jockey” screenings, as means to spare non-meme-addled audiences from suffering the collateral damage of a thrown popcorn bag. This is smart. If young people want to go to the movies to make memories, build them a temple to do it. And maybe install a protective shell around the screen, just to be safe.
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