Is there anyway to find this out ? Rather than just get people’s opinions? Are there any statistics on this kind of thing?
I am talking about people going to the cinema and paying for tickets and then walking out while the movie was still playing. Not changing channels on a movie on TV or even deciding not to finish watching a video or DVD.
I worked at a cinema complex from 1993-1995 in Auckland ,NZ. Pulp Fiction was hugely popular. But it had a huge number of walkouts. I would estimate about 10%(no exagerration). Most of the people walked out at the scene where someone injects another person in the heart.
This is just my opinion of what the most walked out on movie is. But are there any real stats on this kept?
People got upset at the scene where Uma Thurman gets an injection in the chest? But they didn’t get as upset as John Travolta accidentally blowing a guy’s brains all over the back seat and window of a car?
When I went to see the remake of The Hills Have Eyes, it ended with about half the audience it began with (I have a no walk-out policy, but I sure as hell wanted to…)
The Blair witch project had a huge number according to my Movie theater friends. However it was mostly due to the camera style causing violent sea-sickness in a lot of people.
Probably not a specifically measured statistic, but my WAG might be The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover. Lotta ugliness I had to sit through just to get to some Hellen Mirren sex scenes. I walked after she was done.
I saw Gremlins in a theater that was chock full of parents, many of whom had very young children with them. There were a large number of walkouts because the movie was way too dark and scary for the little kids.
It was said that lots of people walked out of The Exorcist. That may or may not have been true.
I’ve walked out of quite a few films due to boredom. Revulsion has driven me from only one film though: **The Witches of Eastwick ** and that scene with the cherries.
Well anaecdotally “Battlefield Earth”. Of the ten or so people (myself included) who I know who went to it at the theater all but two walked out after 15 minutes.
I had to fight to get the money back. The manager tried to argue that the 15 minute/refund policy included the previews.
My wife and I went to Pulp Fiction. We found out later that we both wanted to walk out, starting at the brain scene, but both sat stoically through the rest of that dung heap of a movie because we each thought the other wanted to see it. Worst piece of cinema trash I’ve ever seen in forty years of movie-going. I can easily believe it would be the most walked-out on, simply because if you go in with the expectation that it’s a great comedy, and then are confronted with the reality of it, any sane person would walk out.
To be fair, the injection happens first, so anyone who left after the injection likely never saw the headshot. And if the type of people who walk out all left after the injection, there would be no leave-types left for the headshot.
And I just want to say that everytime I see the name BlinkingBlinking, I always think it says BlingBlingKing.
I don’t know if this counts as leaving “during” the movie, but a fairly large number of Lords of the Rings fans bought tickets for Thirteen Days just to watch the LotR trailer. After the trailer, many of them left.
So technically, a lot of them left before the movie even started, but that’s my nomination.
Two cases of mass walkouts stick in my mind. Both involved Chicago audiencies and in both cases about half the audience bailed. Peter Greenaway’s The Falls cleared a good chunk of the crowd at the interval. Personally it might just be my favourite out of his films, but it ain’t necessarily the one to watch merely on the basis of thinking that The Cook, The Thief … was fashionable. The other instance was Triumph of the Will, which was more a case of people dribbling out as the repetitiveness of it gradually sunk in.