Some young UK fans wearing suits to showings of the new Minions movie as part of a social media trend have been turned away after similarly attired groups engaged in rowdy behaviour.
“Due to a small number of incidents in our cinemas over the weekend we have had to restrict access in some circumstances,” a spokesperson for the Odeon chain, the UK’s largest by market share, told AFP on Tuesday.
Other cinemagoers accused teenagers following the TikTok #gentleminions trend of making noise and throwing things during screenings of “Minions: The Rise of Gru”.
The attire is an homage to the movie’s supervillain Felonious Gru, and is backed by studio Universal Pictures, which wrote on Twitter: “To everyone showing up to @Minions in suits: we see you and we love you.”
Other cinemas have also complained of behaviour of the young fans.
The Mallard, the only cinema on the Channel Island of Guernsey, reported “stunningly bad behaviour”, including vandalism.
“It’s been absolutely heartbreaking. We’ve had families who won’t even go back into the screen when we’ve tried to sort it out, families leaving before the film has even started,” manager Daniel Phillips-Smith told the BBC.
“The children have been in tears.”
But the Vue cinema chain said the smartly-dressed fans were still welcome.
The Minions franchise began with 2010’s “Despicable Me”, which follows the story of supervillain-gone-soft Gru and his babbling overall-clad army of small, yellow pill-shaped creatures.
