Hit the Road

I have a bad habit of writing many posts about the same topic in a row (imagine how bad it would be if you actually knew me in real life and you couldn’t just click the X in the corner).

Obviously, I want to talk about movies again.

A few weeks ago Bart and I went to see a movie. After about ten minutes we both realized “We’re hating this movie with a violent fiery hate” and we got up, walked out, and exchanged our tickets for something different. It was no big deal and the movie theater didn’t care at all – they had reprinted us tickets within about two minutes with no questions asked.

I mentioned this last week in one of my classes and the teacher asked who else had ever walked out of a movie and out of about thirty people, only two ever had.

I was pretty surprised by that, since I felt like it wasn’t that weird of a thing to do. I mean, if you’re in a movie that you are swiftly becoming confident you won’t enjoy for whatever reason (whether it be the content of the movie, loud talkers behind you, a flickering screen, etc), it seems perfectly reasonable to me to leave and ask for a refund or an exchange.

In the past, I’ve walked out of atrocious movies and had other members of my party later tell me that they were loathing the movie as well but felt like “well, I’ve already spent my $5 to see it” (this was like ten years ago, obviously) so they stayed. This don’t really make sense to me since 1) you can nearly always get your money back and 2) even if you can’t, why are you subjecting yourself to abject misery. Why lose both your money AND your time? (Also, why did I not walk out of Napolean Dynamite or Nacho Libre when both of those movies bored me to the very core?)

Anyway, am I just a total freak of movie-going nature? If you’re in the theater are you absolutely set on staying in that seat no matter how unpleasant the next two hours become? Have you or would you ever walk out of a movie?