Jason Momoa stands at the corner of a boxing ring, staring down his mortal enemy on the other side of the ring: A chicken. Above the chicken is a wooden crate. Momoa stares up at it in horror as a baby zombie falls out of the crate, landing on the chicken. Jack Black, tied to a separate corner of the ring, names the monster, uttering a legendary line.
“Chicken Jockey!”
The crowd goes wild. Popcorn, snacks and drinks fly around the theater.
After this showing of “A Minecraft Movie,” Max Spiegel (‘25), Green Hope senior and long-time worker at AMC Theaters, was assigned to clean the theater with a small group of employees.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Spiegel said. “It took us over an hour to clean. We had to delay the showing after because it took so long.”
This is the reality for theaters around the country. Certain scenes from “A Minecraft Movie” have made the rounds online, becoming massively popular memes. This includes the Chicken Jockey scene, in which Steve, played by Jack Black, yells the name of the eponymous mob from the game.
“We marked down the exact time the Chicken Jockey scene was, and we would send a group into the theater to make sure things weren’t getting out of hand,” Spiegel said on how theater employees were dealing with the chaos caused by this scene. Theater reactions to the scene have gone viral on social media, with people going as far as bringing live chickens to the theater.
(Max Spiegel)
Though that did not happen at Spiegel’s AMC, he has his fair share of chicken horror. “Somebody brought in an entire rotisserie chicken,” Spiegel shared. “We found it on the floor, along with a spilled bowl of mushroom soup.”
This mess certainly stands out, as few other movies carry this level of theater mess. As Spiegel says, “I’ve worked a lot of busy openings. None of them were as bad as this.”
This high volume of mess comes from two main factors. The first is that theaters were utterly unprepared for the amount of people coming to see “A Minecraft Movie.” The movie was projected to flop opening weekend, only grossing around $60 million. In reality, the movie nearly tripled these projections.
Now, full theaters aren’t necessarily a problem. Spiegel recounts working on the opening weekend for “Avatar: The Way of Water,” stating that “all the theaters were full. Digital, 3D, they were all full.”
However, the real reason “A Minecraft Movie” is causing such destruction is that so many people that the theaters did not anticipate are dead-set on causing this mess in the theater. Part of the Chicken Jockey meme is people throwing food and drink on the floor of the theater, meaning that employees have to deal with a mess that was intentionally created by the audience.
(Max Spiegel)
This situation invoked a response from Warner Bros., the studio behind “A Minecraft Movie,” as they recently announced new “Block Party” screenings, which encourage the audience to “meme-along” with the movie.
“I hope we don’t get any of those,” Spiegel said, highlighting the potential challenges the new event will bring. Any time that people aren’t purchasing tickets for a movie is time that the theater is not making money. This leads to theaters trying to fit as many showtimes in as many auditoriums as possible. This puts stress on the employees to get the auditoriums clean before each showing, which can be as little as 30 minutes. With the regular screenings taking up to an hour to clean, one can only imagine how long it may take to clean a Block Party screening.
Time will tell whether the Block Party screening will be a bad idea. If the trend of large messes and long clean times continue, it’s possible that theaters will scale back the screenings in order to actually fit in more showtimes.
As “A Minecraft Movie” gets older and the interest for the movie wanes, it’s also possible that the mess will subside and the worst of it has passed. Regardless of the eventual outcome, “A Minecraft Movie” left its mark on theaters, both in terms of the money it brought in and the stubborn stains it caused.
