Mistakes happen in movie theaters on time-- films start late, the house lights don't go down on time, and in places that are still showing actual film, sometimes that film catches on fire. But it's rare that a mistake happens that so drastic it sends the audience actually running for the exits, with children screaming in horror.
And yet, that was exactly the dramatic scene at a British movie theater this week, when a group of parents and kids gathered to see Madagascar 3 were mistakenly shown Paranormal Activity 4. As one parent told Yahoo UK, they realized fairly quickly that something wasn't right, but the movie opens almost immediately with a flashback from the first film-- when Katie flings her bloodied body directly toward the camera. That's a jump scare that had audiences everywhere losing their minds, but you can imagine just how poorly it went over with the child audience. "Everybody just scrambled for the exits, all you could hear were children crying and screaming. Everyone was very upset. It was only about two minutes worth of the film but it was enough to scar them for life."
As much as this is the kind of random mistake that you can't really predict, this is something that was much more unlikely to happen in the days of actual physical film projection, when a real human had to put a film reel on the projector and check the label on it. With digital systems you just have to pull up the movie from the server and click a button, making it much, much easier to choose something wrong by mistake. 10 years ago Tyler Durden had to snip single frames of pornographic films into family movies to drive people crazy. Now you can do it by barely moving a finger.
