The audience of a screening of Disney’s Frozen in Florida was exposed to explicit sexual content that was played before the film got started. As you can imagine, parents (and grandparents) of small children who were in attendance when this happened were not pleased. Was it an accident or a deliberate prank? That seems unclear at the moment.
The video below comes from Fox’s Tampa Bay news affiliate and shows the reactions of some theater goers who were treated to what sounds like some kind of sexually explicit movie scene.
The news report says a moviegoer explained that there were technical difficulties that delayed the start time, so the theater played another cartoon: "They put in the filler, it looked like 'Steamboat Willie,' the old Mickey Mouse cartoon, and then all of a sudden it goes into this other scene," Lynn Greene said.
From Lynn’s description, I’m going to assume that the "filler" she’s referring to is the "Get a Horse" short that Disney played ahead of Frozen at (presumably) all screenings of the film. The "technical difficulties" part of the story may be true, but given that "Get a Horse" is (spoiler alert) partially in black and white and stars Mickey Mouse, I think she may have made an incorrect assumption about the "filler" situation. That’s a minor detail though, but it does muddle up the already vague details a bit in terms of trying to figure out how this happened. Were there technical difficulties? Was the video a snippet from another movie or a clip from a pornographic movie that had no business being in the theater to begin with? Or was it something else? Via Gawker — MoshNews cites a reader as saying it was the extended trailer for Nymphomaniac, which seems entirely possible, given it’s a current movie and the trailer most definitely features graphic content, and not the kind you’d want to expose to children. Check it out here if you’re curious.
The news report says "the movie company said the clip only played for less than two minutes." Less than two minutes might not seem like a long time at all if you’re watching a movie trailer, but it will probably feel like a lot longer if that time-frame involves trying to shield your kids from seeing something they’re way too young to see, so I can’t say I blame any of the parents who might be upset over this. To make amends, Regal reportedly gave them free movie tickets. Whether or not there’s a way to avoid this happening in the future likely depends on how it happened in the first place. These kinds of accidents do tend to happen on occasion. Last year at a theater in the UK, parents and children reportedly went scrambling (and screaming) for the exits when the theater showed Paranormal Activity 4 during what was supposed to be a screening of Madagascar 3.
