Spider-Man: Brand New Day has found its most memorable villain yet, and Marvel didn’t cast him.
A screening of the superhero sequel emptied mid-film on Sunday (2 August) after one attendee’s flatulence overwhelmed the auditorium at the Cine Colombia multiplex in Cartagena’s Plaza Bocagrande shopping centre.
Hundreds of viewers spilled into the corridor, some covering their faces, after the smell made the darkened room intolerable.
Footage from the scene showed crowds milling around outside the screen.
Among them, gamely working the room, was a costumed Spider-Man character.
The film carried on without most of its audience.
The phantom of the multiplex
Nobody knows who did it.
Reports suggest two theories: the culprit either failed to reach the toilets in time, or set off a stink bomb as a prank.
Neither has been confirmed, and the person responsible has not come forward.
Given the circumstances, they probably never will.
Staff did not cancel the screening. Large numbers of patrons simply decided the film was not worth it and left before the end.
No injuries were reported, and the cinema’s other screens ran as normal, presumably with the air conditioning working overtime.
‘Only God knows what that person ate’
Colombian social media treated the news with the gravity it deserved.
“There’s no respect any more, but I don’t think anyone is so rotten as to evacuate an entire auditorium,” one commenter wrote.
Another offered a more charitable reading: “It must have been someone playing a joke and it went wrong.”
A third simply marvelled at the biology involved: “To ruin a whole cinema like that, only God knows what that person ate.”
Many settled on describing the anonymous offender as the film’s unexpected “villain”.
Which is harsh on director Destin Daniel Cretton’s actual script, but hard to argue with.
Why It Matters
Incidents like this no longer stay inside the room where they happen.
Within hours, phone footage of the corridor chaos, complete with a costumed Spider-Man wandering among the displaced, was doing the rounds online, and that clip earned the release more attention than a day of paid marketing.
Cinema chains have leaned hard on event-style screenings to win audiences back from streaming, and event screenings generate user content whether venues want them to or not.
The best free publicity is usually the kind nobody planned. So is the worst.
The Tom Holland sequel continues its run at Plaza Bocagrande and other venues across the city.
Cartagena’s most wanted man, meanwhile, remains at large. Approach downwind.
