It’s taken almost a decade for the stage musical Wicked to make it to the big screen, and even after all this waiting, the movie is only the first part of the whole musical.
While everyone is busy singing the praises of the Wicked movie online, a suspicious trend has been sparked and the fans online have been fighting about it—are people allowed to use phones in cinemas?
Using Phones During Wicked Screenings
While it’s normal to rave about the movie online after (sometimes even during) a screening, one post had been asking some Wicked fandoms to ‘show your Wicked photos’, which had apparently sparked an online debate. Here’s the post:
This was then followed up by several people who were talking about how it was bad manners in cinemas to take photos with your phone during a movie. Heck, even just texting on your phone is considered rude since the brightness would bother the other audience members.
This all just went into a discourse of what is okay for an audience to do during a screening; not just with their phones, but with singing along to the movie as well. There have been posts urging audience members to keep quiet during the screening and not sing along with the scenes, but videos like this have been shared online:
What’s also crazy is that the movie singers just got the seal of approval from A-list movie star himself—Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson.
Can You Smell What the Rock is Cooking
In a recent interview with the BBC on the red carpet for Moana 2, Johnson was asked to comment on audience members who love to sing alongside the movies in the theater, to which he replied, “Sing! You’ve paid your hard earned money for a ticket, and you've gone into a musical, and you’re into it. Sing.”
Immediately the post was met with replies like, “Ain't nobody paying for a movie ticket to hear the AUDIENCE sing,” and shots at the Rock saying, “There is no brain in that massive head he’s got.”
Admittedly, fans are currently divided with exactly how to enjoy Wicked in cinemas. There’s the camp that just wants to watch the movie in peace, but there are definitely the fans who want the combined energy of an audience enjoying a movie.
Wicked Sing-Along
Luckily, Wicked had already foreseen this problem, and there’s going to be a Sing-Along version of the movie that will be coming out on Christmas, and it will be released in multiple theaters nationwide. Sure it’s a bummer that fans will have to wait for a month until it releases, but at least they know there’s going to be a screening of the movie that won’t shame them for showing their love for the film—regardless of how good they are at singing along.
The last time there was musical discourse like this was the release of the Les Miserables movie, and even that film didn’t get the Sing-Along version released.
Wicked is now showing in theaters.