Movie theaters are busy places with a lot of moving parts, so it's to be expected that mistakes will happen. However, one recent theater error may have left lots of children scarred for life when instead of a screening of Detective Pikachu, an audience comprised largely of children, was subjected to The Curse of La Llorona and all the trailers that went with it.
The situation started when Ryan George went to a screening that was supposed to be Detective Pikachu. As one would expect, the theater had a lot of kids in it. They, and their parents, probably began to wonder when the first thing to happen after the lights went down was a trailer for a movie that those kids really didn't need to be subjected to. As George said on Twitter...
The theatre I'm in is playing a trailer for Annabelle Comes Home before Detective Pikachu LOOK AWAY CHILDREN OH NO
The children did not look away. As one might expect, this did not go well. If this had been a random mismatch of a trailer and had been an isolated incident, things probably would have been ok. However, it was not. The next trailer to run wasn't much better.
Andddd kids are crying. Now the Joker trailer is playing.
I can imagine at this point the parents might have been more upset than the kids. I can imagine very young children looking forward to Detective Pikachu simply being more confused by the Joker trailer than anything. Parents, however, were probably quite disturbed.
If you guessed that the terror did not end there, you'd be correct.
NOW IT'S CHUCKY OH NO CHILDREN OH NO
Yeah, the killer toy probably went over really well with both the kids and their parents. I can imagine.
Of course, as it turned out, the random horror movie trailers stuck in front of Detective Pikachu were actually just symptoms of a bigger problem, as the theater had actually mis-scheduled the screening and was actually playing Conjuring-verse movie The Curse of La Lorona instead of the Pokemon movie.
OH MY GOD THEY'RE PLAYING LA LLORANA INSTEAD OF DETECTIVE PIKACHU
At some point, the mistake was realized and the movie was shut off, at which point the entire audience was moved into another theater that had, one assumes, started playing Detective Pikachu accidentally, as the new audience found the film waiting for them.
We've all been moved to another theatre where Detective Pikachu is just paused? At least there aren't any more murders on-screen
One certainly hopes they started the movie over from the beginning once the audience was seated.
With modern theaters it's now incredibly convenient to move any given movie to any screening room where it's needed with just a couple presses of a button. There's no need to physically move reels or even a disc. However, if those buttons are pressed in error, you can end up giving kids nightmares.
