Star Wars crowd goes 'crazy' when theatre glitch skips movie ahead
Cellphone video capturing the audience's screams and hollers goes viral
Audiences have been going nuts for the new Star Wars film — but one Hollywood crowd upped that hysteria for another reason, screaming and freaking out when glitches with the movie theatre's projector skipped the movie ahead.
The technical troubles happened during a midnight screening of The Force Awakens at the ArcLight multiplex in Hollywood early Friday morning.
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Erik Melendez, 20, who was in the audience, told CBC News that shortly after the screening started, it became plagued with issues involving the film's 3D effects. He said the theatre stopped the movie to fix this.
"They promised to rewind it about five minutes. When it finally came back on, it came back about 15 minutes ahead. Because we had obviously never seen the movie before, everyone in the theater believed it to be a spoiler," he wrote to CBC News on Sunday.
"The audience went crazy. Everyone started yelling, throwing popcorn, running out of the theatre with their ears covered ... people were turning around flipping off the people working the projector and running out of the theatre sprinting."
Melendez said luckily the scene it skipped to was not a spoiler "per se," despite his initial worries.
Capturing the commotion
He captured part of the crowd's commotion on his cellphone and posted it online, where it has now gone viral. It is laden with audience members yelling "No, no, no!" over and over.
Melendez's cousin, Andy Pacheco, was also in the audience and posted a longer video of the crowd reaction to YouTube that has been watched almost 100,000 times.
In Pacheco's video, audience members can be heard yelling at the theatre's projectionists, trying to instruct them to rewind the movie even farther.
"They don't want us to watch Star Wars. They turned it off," one crowd member can be heard saying.
Melendez says the theatre was apologetic, providing a full refund and vouchers to return to a future screening. He says he wants to go again in order to catch the "little details that connect back to the previous films."
He says his experience going viral has been fun.
"I just wanted to watch my favourite movie, the night took a funny turn and all of a sudden I wake up to the world wanting to use my video."