Marshall and the Movies

Following up on movie disruptions from yesterday’s factoid, I turn today to my biggest moviegoing pet peeve: disruptive children.

I’m glad to see that theater are FINALLY addressing the issue.  It can seriously ruin an entire movie, like I described in Random Factoid #32:

I was at “Funny People,” and I was jammed next to a woman and her baby.  I knew that it would be bad news before the movie started when her daughter wouldn’t stop whining during the pre-show entertainment.  She managed to keep it together for the beginning of the movie, but I knew she was a ticking time bomb.  During a poignant and emotional scene between Adam Sandler and Leslie Mann, the baby starts screaming at a level so loud that it blocked out the sound from the movie.  And if the audience was staring bullets at her mother, she must have been wearing a Kevlar body suit.  She let her daughter scream and cry for over 2 minutes before taking her out, just in time to ruin the scene for the entire theater.

I’m happy to report that over the summer, I went to a theater that added “please go outside if your child is disruptive” to the opening messages like “silence your cell phones” and “please throw trash in the specified containers.”  It’s about time.  But alas, that was only one theater.  Just one.

Is anyone else with me to sign some sort of petition to get EVERY theater to do this?