We have received multiple emails from people saying that theaters are telling patrons that air-conditioning is broken in the auditoriums showing the hit movie Sound of Freedom and offering another movie or a refund. Many people fear that a campaign is underway to suppress the box office totals for the film, which exposes the sex-trafficking of children. The box office success of SoF is particularly embarrassing for Disney, whose ridiculously expensive Indiana Jones movie is performing poorly and unlikely to earn a profit, because Disney reportedly sat on the rights to distribute Sound of Freedom for five years, only to relinquish the rights and see it become a smash hit. Unhappy shareholders may well question the wisdom of retaining current management if SoF becomes a mega-hit based on word of mouth.
I was skeptical that theater managers would deliberately turn away business, especially with a potential blockbuster on their hands. Summer blockbusters are how most theatres are able to stay in business. And theatre managers’ jobs depend on filling seats and staying out of the red.
As one emailer wrote, this is not necessarily a conspiracy:
FYI, I don’t habitually wear a tinfoil hat. Maybe (I dunno) a/c failures are random and common; so managers rationally put the expected-low-boxoffice film in the crippled room.
But reports continue to proliferate of mysterious outages of air-conditioning in just one screen at multiplexes. The video below purports to compile stories of this happening all across the country:
The comments on the video provide the names and locations of specific theatres, giving attorneys for the distributor a road map to investigate. If there is any substance to these suspicions, I suspect that we will know about it soon enough.
