Chalamet Tells London Cinema Crowd: Stop Laughing — SkimNews
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- Timothée Chalamet recorded a pre-screening message for London's Prince Charles Cinema asking audiences not to laugh 'like Max Cady' during moments not meant to be funny, citing a 'disconnect' between older films and modern sensibilities around dated sex, violence, language and technology.
- A film writer on Substack has dubbed the trend of audiences guffawing at everything from A Space Odyssey to the films of David Lynch as 'performative laughter,' with Reddit threads documenting the phenomenon at repertory screenings.
- Boorman and the Devil, a new documentary in cinemas, defends John Boorman's 1977 Exorcist II: The Heretic, which Warner Bros bankrolled for a then-unprecedented $14m and which collapsed at the box office after audiences reportedly laughed at it across America.
- Boorman frantically re-edited the film mid-release, adding a more unhappy ending and cutting laughed-at scenes, but Warner Bros declined to replace US prints due to cost — though international audiences received the revised cut.
- Even the documentary's sympathetic interviewees — directors, critics and industry professionals — still consider Exorcist II a bad film; Boorman himself, now 93, says he still feels 'the old wound' of the mocking laughter.
- Tommy Wiseau's The Room, a 2003 drama that appears on the same worst-of lists, demonstrates how laughter can be monetised — the Prince Charles Cinema does a 'roaring trade' in screenings where fans snigger en masse, with Wiseau appearing for Q&As treated like an A-lister.
Why it matters: Exorcist II's $14m budget couldn't survive audiences laughing it out of cinemas in 1977, and John Boorman still feels 'the old wound' nearly 50 years later — yet The Room shows the same mockery can be monetised as cult-hero status, proving audience laughter is less a verdict on quality than a force filmmakers must learn to navigate or exploit.
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