#No Way Home Three Times In One Day

I knew the 10:30 P.M. showing of “Spider-Man: No Way Home” was going to be different when a large group of people decided they didn’t like their assigned seats and moved to seats that had a better view — and which, therefore, would have been booked weeks in advance. The seats’ true owners arrived less than five minutes later, resulting in what we Brits call “a bit of a kerfuffle.”

Here’s the thing about 10:30 P.M. movie showings: they’re past the bedtimes of both children and people over the age of 30. As I sat down for my third trip through “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” I realized that I was the oldest person in a highly concentrated crowd of late teens and early 20-somethings. I felt like an old millennial mother hen brooding over my little clutch of zoomer eggs. 

Another thing about 10:30 P.M. movie showings: at this point in the day the cinema is running on a skeleton crew, and things are bound to slip. In this case, the lights were left on after the movie began. No big deal; I did a quick dash to the front desk to raise the “lights are still on” alarm and was rewarded with learning the location of the cinema’s Big Light switches. With great power comes great responsibility.

“Spider-Man: No Way Home” got underway for the third time. Then something happened that I have never before experienced in real life, only witnessed in episodes of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” Someone’s phone started ringing and, rather than silencing it, they took the call, speaking at full volume. And things only got wilder five minutes later (20 minutes into the movie), when a group of friends arrived and the call-taker turned on the flashlight on their phone and shone it down into the crowd, signaling their friends to their seats like an airport marshall waving their wands to guide a 747 to the runway. A sea of confused faces turned around and squinted into the sudden, blinding bright light. 

Did the chaos end there? Nope! The jubilantly reunited friends then proceeded to have a conversation — again, at full volume — while poor Peter Parker was explaining his predicament to Doctor Strange. If superhero movies have taught us anything, it’s that when evil rises, good people will rise up to fight it. And so it was that, less than a minute into the noisy conversation, a hero’s voice rose up from the rows and cried out: 

“Would you shut the f*** up, you f***ing d***heads? We’re trying to watch the f***ing film!”