[Spoilers for The Last Jedi below]
There’s a scene in The Last Jedi unlike anything we’ve seen in a Star Wars movie before (and for once, it has nothing to do with porgs or crystal critters).
After Holdo, played by person-of-the-year Laura Dern, crashes a resistance ship at light-speed into a First Order destroyer, the sound vanishes. It’s a stunningly effective artistic decision from director Rian Johnson; both times I’ve seen the film, multiple people have filled in the silence with audible gasps. It’s also something moviegoers aren’t used to, which is why certain AMC theaters put up a sign warning, “The Last Jedi contains a sequence at approximately 1 hour and 52 minutes into the movie in which ALL sound stops for about 10 full seconds. While the images continue to play on the screen you will hear nothing. This is intentionally done by the director for a creative effect.”
The notices were roundly criticized and mocked, and according to Entertainment Weekly, some of them have already been taken down.
After taking matters into their own hands, two AMC movie theaters have removed signs that tipped off moviegoers to one particular scene in Star Wars: The Last Jedi when the sound cuts out. According to an AMC spokesperson, they were removed even before media coverage of them.
“The sign was up at two of AMC’s 660 locations. It was removed last week before the media coverage began,” read a statement to EW. (Via)
The three people (the same three people who call into sports talk radio, I imagine) who complained about the moment of silence really made a dent in The Last Jedi‘s box office: it’s already the second highest grossing film of 2017.
(Via Entertainment Weekly)