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“A Minecraft Movie” starring Jack Black tore up the box office with a $157 million opening last weekend; the problem for one New Jersey theatre owner however is that some of the teenage boys in the audience tore up his theatre watching the film. Dave Rose is the manager of the Township Theatre in Washington Township. He says his manager called him practically in tears after the theatre was trashed Friday night. According to the manager, popcorn and soda were all over the floors, theatre seats were covered in hand crème, and one row of seats was even torn out of the anchors that rooted it to the floor. Rose appeared on 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program to bemoan the disruptive behavior, which has now led him to ban audience members under 18 from watching the movie without an adult.
“We noticed a lot of kids were coming in, just buying a ticket each, and the line was out the door, because to process one at a time takes a while,” Rose told host Ken Rosato, sitting in for Larry Mendte. “What I’m finding out is apparently there were memes on TikTok that basically incite rowdy behavior, based on things that the characters say… [and] the kids got rowdy, throwing stuff, jumping up on seats, going crazy with each other, and they brought tubes of hand crème… and these kids were stupid enough to take a Tik Tok video of themselves doing it, which then went viral.”
Rose is sorry he had to institute the ban, but he couldn’t believe how dismissive parents were about their sons’ behavior: “My wife put a Facebook post out… I did not know these kids, but some of the parents responded by defending their kids, saying, oh they’re kids, they’re having fun. They’re having fun, so that post went crazy.”
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