This guest post is written by Anthony Nash.
We’ve all been there: You’re at the movies, getting ready to watch the latest hit film. You’ve picked up some popcorn or candy, settled into the seat, and the movie has begun playing. That’s when you can faintly hear the people behind you talking. Elsewhere, you notice the not-so-faint glow of someone’s phone as they scroll through social media or send a text. You try to pay attention to the movie, but more and more it becomes obvious that those around you are only half invested, and simply doing their own thing while the movie plays.
It’s a surprisingly common occurrence in today’s day and age. While movie theaters were once thought of as a dying business, they seem to be on the rise yet again. In 2020, the U.S. box office plummeted by 80%, kickstarting a race to streaming for many services. When this proved not to be what people wanted, and as the COVID-19 pandemic continued to subside, the industry began to rebound.
According to a new study by Fandango (PDF link), 2025 was a transformative year for the domestic box office, and signaled that fans, specifically young ones, want to watch a movie in a theater. The study showed that 87 percent of Gen-Zers polled had seen a movie in a theater last year, compared to a low number like just 58 percent of the Baby Boomer generation.
But as more people go to watch movies, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that people don’t really care to “behave” there. Every time a new big movie comes out, folks are taking to social media to share how surprised they are by how inconsiderate people are. With Gen-Z moviegoers slowly starting to rise, and theaters beginning to come out of the rougher days of the COVID-19 era, it seems like the biggest issue that people now face is the fact that there will be constant distractions from people at any given time.
Of course, this phenomenon isn’t anything new. People talking and generally being annoying in a movie theater is likely a tale as old as movie theaters themselves. However, it’s the digital age of today that has made it even more troublesome. Where talking and general annoyance was once able to be ignored to a degree, it’s significantly harder to ignore someone blatantly using their phone during the movie. The phone issue is the biggest and most obvious annoyance that people complain about, and it’s a tough one to solve for many reasons.
For one, people are simply too addicted to their phones now. It sounds like a “old man yelling at clouds” thing to say, but many people, specifically those of the younger generation, are too used to having their phones around them at all times. Being unable to check it for two to three hours at a time seems like a foreign concept, especially after people have already developed some pretty strong second-screen habits during the pandemic, and as streaming movies and TV shows became so prominent.
Outside of the general addiction to phones, social media and community play a large role, too. As moviegoing goes back on the rise, sharing that you’re going to the movies has now taken on a life of its own. Simply look at social media during the release week of a movie like “The Odyssey” or “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” and you’ll see non-stop images of people taking photos of either the middle of the movie, or the movie’s title screen. This is even worse when it’s an “event” movie, like something set in the MCU or during “A Minecraft Movie,” where it became a viral meme to yell or clap in the theater.
At face value, it sounds almost frivolous to complain about stuff like this. Objectively, it’s good that movie theaters are rebounding from an awful early 2020s, and people championing movies, even if obnoxiously, is ultimately good. The main issue, though, is that there seems to be few a theaters that seem to care about doing anything about it. And unfortunately, those that do seem to have given up the fight.
For decades, Alamo Drafthouse has been a place that championed not being a jerk at the movies. Founded in 1997, the theater chain became famous for being so particular about phone usage and talking during movies, that it’d actually kick you out of the theater for doing either. Almost billing itself as the proper alternative to movie theaters, Alamo was somewhere you knew you were very unlikely to see someone on Instagram or chatting during a movie.
However, even they seem to have thrown in the towel. At the beginning of the year, the company (which was acquired by Sony Pictures in 2024) announced a major change to how it worked. The chain, which allows you to order food and drinks directly to your seat, had previously operated on a pen-and-paper system. However, that’s now changed, and the company has since implemented a mobile ordering system. The irony here is almost too on the nose. The theater chain famous for telling people to stay off their phones now requires it for ordering even a glass of water.
To Alamo’s (partial) credit, the theater does still say it will kick you out for doing anything other than using your phone to order, but once you open Pandora’s box, it’s impossible to close it. Once you tell people it’s okay to use their phones, there is no putting rules to it. As an avid Alamo attendee, there has been a noticeable uptick in people looking at their phones to order, then popping open the messaging app to quickly check a text.
Now that Alamo has more or less washed its hands of phone usage discourse, there aren’t many places left that care. Arthouse theaters are rare unless you live in a major city, and large chains are happy to get people in no matter what. For those of us who love movies for the art that they are, it’s an admittedly pretty rough case of the monkey’s paw curling. The world of movies is surging in ways it hasn’t this decade, but at the cost of people making the moviegoing experience a frankly annoying one. That leaves us with just one, aforementioned option: Shame.
The main problem with people using their phones, talking, being messy, or otherwise any other annoying habit in the theaters is that it feels weird asking them to stop. Whether it be an innate issue with not wanting to be seen as complaining, or just the awkward feeling of having to tell someone to stop doing something, there are far fewer people willing to ask someone to put their phone away than there are people using their phones at a movie.
If this is our brave new world, then we must champion an age where folks respect the craft they’ve paid sometimes a large sum to see. If you find yourself heading to watch a movie, treat it like an escape from the constant pull of social media. Get lost in a new piece of art that might awaken some emotions in you that you never even knew you had. And if you see someone else snapping pictures of the screen, don’t be afraid to tell them to cut that out.
Image Credit: Krists Luhaers
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