CREED III Sparks Dangerous Fights In Theaters
By Movieguide® Contributor
CREED III is currently dominating the box office, but the onscreen violence has spilled out into some audiences.
While Movieguide® found CREED III to have some strong moral elements, the movie was marred by rough street fighting and boxing scenes.
According to Deadline, police have been called to theaters in France and Germany after moviegoers started fighting. A movie security guard suffered a head injury after the audience started throwing bottles and cans.
500 people were forced to evacuate another French theater after a huge fight broke out, and the screening of CREED III was canceled. Deadline reports that nearly a dozen other disturbances occurred during screenings across the country.
After similar instances in Germany, police were brought in to calm the fighting.
Some theaters have even stopped showing the movie, fearing more fights. Others have hypothesized that the fighters were planted to garner publicity for the boxing movie.
These in-theater fights show the dangers of showing violence in TV and movies and how it can affect viewers.
Movieguide® has previously reported on the effects that violence on screen can have on audiences:
Scientific research has focused both on the quality and quantity of violence on television. Most research has focused on the quantitative content analyses, especially whether the amount of violence on television was increasing or decreasing. Some of the early research that counted acts of violence didn’t examine the context of television violence. Qualitative analysis requires exact definitions of violence to determine whether the act was counted or not. For example, it’s necessary to decide if verbal violence should be counted or whether comic violence such as cartoons would be registered.
Consider a cartoon where a character is hit by a hammer, the character shakes his head and continues on his way. Many researchers consider this “happy violence,” the worst type of entertainment violence because it is unrealistic. Such cartoon violence might encourage children to imitate it because it shows no consequences. Others think children understand that cartoons are make believe. Scholars have usually included cartoon violence.
Many movies aimed at children have contained excessive violence. The partly animated WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT has 52 acts of violence. The children’s fantasy movie, NINJA TURTLES, contains 194 acts of violence, many committed by the heroes, including kicking, concussion-dealing blows and characters delighting in inflicting violence.
The problem of what kind of violence to include and exclude in a study also pertains to slapstick humor and violent sports, which may make violence an acceptable or even desirable part of American life.
Mass media violence is that violence portrayed by any of the methods of mass communication, including television, movies, video games, toys that are mass produced, comic books, the Internet, CDs, CD-ROMs, DVDs, and computers. Most of the research has to do with television, movies and pornographic materials.
A broad definition might yield a high violence count on a given television program or in a given medium. This is not important since the focus is on whether the violence raises concerns within the context of the show. For example, it’s possible that a situation comedy might yield several scenes of violence, but the context in which it occurs might lead to the conclusion that none of these scenes is inappropriate.
All violence is not created equal. It’s important to distinguish between uses of violence that raise concern and those acts which, because of their nature and the context in which they occur, do not.
It is important to examine the full range of portrayals of violence in the media, including the type of violence your child has been exposed to if your family is at all typical of families in general.
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