2025-10-15: This is a story I still tell, and it still goes over pretty well. However, reading back over it, this initial writing was a bit odd. Some details were a bit mean spirited. Extra details were added, some being wrong. There was a faux braggadocio vibe in places. It was odd to find what I consider one of my favorite "accidental gaffe" stories was initially written very nearly from a place of spite despite [French pun?] never even being my immediate vibe even closer to the event. What's more, a couple of elements — such as talking to the teens — was cut out for reasons I cannot fathom.
I have now updated it a bit to feel more like the actual story, the way I tell it now, and therefore have updated the language mostly past tense. I have left the initial date in place, above, but this is very much the 2025 version.
To fully understand this story, you have to appreciate two things. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World had become a bit of a meme about a movie that no one was watching. And, in Huntsville, Alabama at least, movie theaters were just starting to truly embrace pre-picking your seats. In 2010, some cinemas kept it a lot more optional.
That out of the way, here's how Kaz and I once ruined the movie-going night of a whole stack of people. Unintentionally.
We had been wanting to see Scott Pilgrim vs. The World for some time. We loved Edgar Wright. We loved Michael Cera. I had read the graphic novels and loved those. For us, this movie was the most hyped movie for some time. We were busy, though. And everyone kept talking about how it was a really good movie that no one was seeing.
I was already no longer really a cinema person, even back then. I liked home media. I liked pause buttons. Cheaper popcorn. Couches for seats. Getting to pet my cat. All those things.
Some movies begged for a big screen viewing, though. This was one that had that feel. More than that, I wanted to tell the people who made it that I care.
Cinemas near us were starting to have pre-ordering for tickets. With assigned seat numbers. Only not a lot of them were being forceful about it. A few times folks would be in our seats and we would move. That had begun to shift about now, and this story is all about how I truly realized that.
We finally got a free schedule to go see it. We got there early. Not terribly early but maybe a quarter-hour pre-trailer-reel. Time to get concessions and stroll to our seats. Except as we are going in, a very nervous, very movie-geeky guy strikes up a loud conversation with us about how awesome the movie is going to be and how he loves the comics and all that. Someone with poor volume control. My first mistake was judging him. It was mean of me. I admit that now but in the moment I started to have a fear. I only got to the cinema a few times a year, a couple-to-three times was my annual total for good years. Some of those showings were absolutely ruined by people around us.
We sat down in our designated seats. The guy sat right behind us. He's joined by a woman. No clue their relationship and it is not really pertinent to anything, so let's just say his Buddy. Guy and Buddy talked quite loudly — with each other, no longer involving us — and they ended up with their feet shoved up against the back of our seats. Telling jokes. Geeking out. The foot thing sucked but the rest was fine. Enjoy yourself. Don't let me yuck your yum.
The place was still mostly empty. Trailers are just starting. There are maybe a dozen people at the showing. This is important to remember: back before assigned seating in movie theaters, you tended to need to get there a bit early to make sure you got a good seat. I hadn't yet cottoned on to new normal, that early arrivals were entirely optional.
Then I came up with my bad idea. This was a movie infamous for the empty theaters. Sure, this was Huntsville, with its much higher-than-average geek quotient, but surely people would be here by now, right? Maybe we just leave Guy + Buddy behind and go and find another seat? There are so many to choose from.
Kaz and I back to the corner seats. Facing the screen, these would be the rear left seats. Top of the steps. Back to the wall. I never sit back there if I can help it, but it seemed nice because it was pretty empty in the back. A few people were drifting in, including a few back near where we were, but it was still a mostly empty place.
Around the first real trailer — this also around the time where you had a few fake out pre-movie adverts glommed into the trailer reel — a fair-sized group of teens came in. They paused. We heard them say, "Oh, but that's OUR seats." I was not sure they were actually talking about us, not at first. I mean, they were definitely talking about us, but there was also some doubt.
We chatted briefly with them. I think I mentioned the loud guy. Memory is fuzzy about them, now. We said we could give up the seats. They actually told us it was ok. They pulled the same rough trick we did: mostly empty place, movie about to start, just get some different seats. Reconfiguring their geometry across a couple of rows. Better for them, because now they can sit in a rough semi-circle instead of a row where you can only talk to neighbors. Nearly a win-win type thing.
Then it happened again. Only this time it's some the teens in the way. Two guys dressed in black shirts and black shorts come up and start counting the rows. It was obvious where it was going. We knew it. The teens knew. it. They meantion that someone was in their seats — she didn't actually say it was us — and the guys go, "Oh, well, we'll sit back here!," and then sat down next to us. Others did similar. Folks were moving around folks. Reconfiguring.
Turned out, while not a sold out showing, it was going to be a solid one.
Around the time we were getting to the end of the trailers, I was thinking we should try and undo some of our damage. How, though? It was a knot of misplaced people. An unwindable twisted maze of connect-the-butt-to-the-designated-seat. Then perhaps the funniest coincidence occurred. Irony, really. Guy + Buddy from near the start of this? They were in the wrong seats. Someone was loudly shouting at them to move. Had we stayed, the person we were trying to avoid would not have even been behind us.
Only, back in the back, the final round began. This was to be the nuclear round. A mom with her two kids comes in and we all can sense the thunderstorm. After staring at the teens, she went and takes our original seats. Then got back up and decided to make a stand. Not at the people who caused the problem — Kaz and I — but at the teens who had tried working with us. The mom is waving her tickets at one of the teenagers and the girl stands up to start talking loudly about how their seats were stolen.
I was an asshole for judging Guy + Buddy. I was a bigger asshole for making people move without taking the L. Both pale in comparison with how big of an asshole I was about to be.
I stood up, grabbed Kaz, and headed the other way. Away from the crowd that was arguing about the mess we just made. As I was glancing back, no one had yet noticed we were gone. Well, presumably the folks we had just scooted past was aware, but I don't think they had realized this was all our fault. Then I saw something that makes me chuckle to this day, in a mean way.
The girl who was taking the brunt of mom's frustration was saying something and then pointed back, presumably to prove that we had stole her seats. Only she was pointing to empty, unoccupied space.
A bit into the movie, I glance back and there seems to have been another group added in because new people in white polos are standing around. Even if the teens wanted to move — and I truly believe they really, really wanted to move — the whole area back there was a wasteland.
White polo shirt group eventually came down to sit in a row in front of us. Then some people came in well after the movie started and got mad because white-polo gang was in their seats. I have no idea where the mom and her kids had gone. I have no idea how many total people got shuffled. I have no idea if the teens were lying about those being their seats.
People were talking about it after the movie was over. No one, not even the teens, ever said anything to us, though.
And Guy + Buddy? They just shut up and enjoyed the hell out of the movie.