Teen brawls broke out in California — and across the country — on $4 movie day
Multiple police agencies responded to the Del Amo Fashion Center in Torrance after fights among youths broke out, with hundreds of young people gathering to watch.
For the last two years, National Cinema Day has brought millions of people into U.S. theaters thanks to steeply discounted tickets.
The unofficial cinephile holiday on Sunday may have ushered in an unintended consequence: teenage pandemonium. And not for the first time.
Last year — when an estimated 8.1 million moviegoers attended major theaters over Labor Day weekend for the first National Cinema Day — hundreds of teenagers crowded outside theaters in Georgia, Michigan and Florida, where police responded to reports of juveniles fighting.
Sunday afternoon, police across the country responded to similar reports, including at two California malls where AMC theaters offered $4 tickets.
Police said 1,000 juveniles watched a fight at the Del Amo Fashion Center in Torrance on Sunday afternoon. Meanwhile, youths brawled at an Emeryville mall.
At Del Amo Fashion Center in Torrance, police estimated that more than a thousand juveniles swarmed to watch a fight among other young people. There were several minor injuries and a witness report of at least one gunshot fired, said Torrance Police Sgt. Ron Salary.
About 30 minutes later, at 4:30 p.m., in Northern California, police responded to a call about a disturbance and escorted about 50 young people from a store at the Bay Street Mall in Emeryville. Over the next couple of hours, hundreds more youth gathered, with several fights breaking out near the courtyard of the mall.
On streets around the mall, a gunshot was fired, according to police, and a juvenile victim was stabbed and transported to a hospital with a non-life-threatening injury.
Police said Monday that the youth swarm seemed to have originated from a social media post encouraging teenagers to “meet up” at the shopping center, although investigators had not determined why fights broke out or what led to the stabbing.
Across the country, similar stories played out on Sunday.
In Boston, fights among juveniles erupted outside two AMC movie theaters, leading to the arrests of 13 youths ages 12 to 17. Officers reported a juvenile jumping on one officer’s back, holding the officer in a chokehold. Another young person stomped on the roof of a car, police said.
In Cicero, Ill., a teen boy was injured in a shooting as hundreds of other teenagers who had been gathered at an AMC left the theater. Fighting broke out near Southcenter Mall in Tukwila, Wash., the site of another AMC theater, where one juvenile was detained, allegedly in possession of a firearm.
In Albany, N.Y., multiple law enforcement agencies were dispatched to a mall where several youth skirmishes had broken out, including at a Regal movie theater.
And in Georgia, two teens were arrested at Arbor Place Mall, which houses a Regal Cinemas theater, after a fight involving about 10 youths erupted.
Ahead of the $4 movie day, Georgia’s Douglasville Police Department put out a news release urging parents to keep their children home on National Cinema Day after last year’s $3 event was a scene of fighting and chaos — including the arrests of 19 juveniles.
A nonprofit arm of the National Assn. of Theater Owners announces that Sept. 3 will be a nationwide discount day on more than 30,000 screens.
Much of the problem last year stemmed from parents dropping their children off instead of “sticking around to make sure they were obeying the rules,” Police Chief Gary Sparks said in the release.
There was also speculation that fake fights being filmed for a TikTok video turned into actual fights.
“Don’t let the mall’s movies raise your child,” Sparks said in the statement. “When they get out of your presence, they might do things that will come back and embarrass you.”
Movie theater employees expressed frustration on Reddit with the $4 movie day, with several commenting on a post about the day being disastrous.
One user called last year’s National Cinema Day “one of the worst days” they had worked; another wrote they received an email informing them of “kids running around pepper spraying auditoriums.” Several users commented that their theaters shut down early.
An AMC usher from South Jersey, who requested anonymity, told The Times he spent his shift cleaning up popcorn, stopping kids from sneaking into theaters without paying and listening to the chaos unfold in his earpiece.
The usher said he listened to his manager request extra security and announce that police had been called after “hordes of teenagers” broke into fights in the lobby. The theater closed three hours earlier than usual because of the chaos, he said.
“Going to the movies is supposed to be a relaxing entertainment experience. We don’t need Black Friday but for movies,” he said. “An older woman went up to me and said, ‘This place is dangerous, I’m never coming here again.’ It’s clearly making us look very bad. There’s no way they could do it a third time.”
Established by the Cinema Foundation, National Cinema Day originated in 2022 to court moviegoers when the box office was experiencing a downturn — and as a “thank you” to moviegoers returning to cinemas after two years of COVID-19, the head of the foundation said. Last year, it was described by organizers as a test run with the possibility of becoming an annual event.
The Cinema Foundation is a nonprofit arm of the National Assn. of Theatre Owners; representatives for the organizations did not respond to an inquiry on whether moviegoers could expect a third year of cinema day.
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