Cinema etiquette: Cynthia Erivo and Dwayne Johnson are dead wrong, it’s not OK to sing at the movies

Dwayne Johnson is many things — a former wrestler, a charismatic but sexless movie star, and a panderer to the people.

Look, that’s fine, and it’s why he’s popular. He flashes his big toothy smile and tells the people what they want to hear. Which is why it was surprising when he decided to wade into a debate that is extremely divisive: cinema etiquette.

Johnson’s comments earlier this week that moviegoers should sing aloud to their heart’s content, was, overnight, echoed by Wicked star Cynthia Erivo. She said she was “OK with” patrons singing in a cinema screening. She added, “We spent this long singing it ourselves, it’s time for everyone else to join in, it’s wonderful.”

All public spaces are contested spaces, including cinemas which has seen, anecdotally, a decline in decorum post-pandemic, and having celebrities with big platforms endorse bad behaviour is distressing.

Johnson’s contention was that, “You’ve paid your hard-earned money for a ticket, and you’ve gone into a musical, and you’re into it, sing”.

You know who else paid for a ticket with their hard-earned money? Every other person in that cinema who made a choice to be there and enjoy the performances of the professional actors on screen.

Do you want to hear Erivo and Ariana Grande and Moana’s Auli’i Cravalho express their characters’ emotional journeys through their perfect pitches or do you want to listen to Beryl in the row behind you, butchering every note and never understanding why she didn’t make it into the Australian Youth Choir?

Even if Beryl was an amazing vocalist, that was still not the deal when the rest of the audience bought their ticket. They didn’t sign up for karaoke night.

Johnson and Erivo might think (or maybe they weren’t thinking) that encouraging people to engage in that way will sell more tickets to their films, but it could easily have the opposite effect.

If you knew you ran the risk of a wannabe idol belting out the tunes in Wicked, Moana 2 and every musical movie in the future, would you still fork out $30 for that ticket? There are lots of people who wouldn’t.

Studios and cinemas have a hard enough time convincing people to go to the cinema, they didn’t need this extra obstacle.

That’s why there are dedicated sing-along sessions for the more popular musicals, and they will undoubtedly stage them for Wicked. Disney will surely release a sing-along version of Moana 2 for streaming the same way the used to have sing-along compilation VHS tapes in the 1990s.

The debate over cinema etiquette led to one American cinema chain, AMC, issue a statement before Wicked that patrons should not sing in the theatre. They don’t want to have to police complaints and fights in every session.

People also shouldn’t talk through the movie, use their phone to check Instagram or, as many people now think themselves entitled to do, video or photograph the screen. No, you don’t need to post a clip of Paul Mescal in Gladiator II on your socials, we all know what he looks like.

A bright phone screen is incredibly distracting in a dark space, all eyes are drawn to it despite ourselves.

All those transgressions in a cinema is no different to if someone in the audience at the opera decided to sing along to Puccini’s Turandot, croaking out “Nessun Dorma” as if they were Luciano Pavarotti reincarnated.

It’s not just about respect for the performers on stage, it’s about the audience. It doesn’t matter if you’ve paid $300 for a seat at the ballet or $15 for a cheap-arse Tuesday movie ticket. What you’ve paid for is the right to enjoy the work without distraction and to shut the hell up.

It might seem as if cinema etiquette is a petty debate and there are more “serious” things going on in the world, but what it reveals is the continued contest of public spaces in a world that is increasingly more individualist.

For some people, their entitlement to bend every experience to their will is paramount. So, they put their feet up on the chair in front of them, talk through the movie, sneak in fried food, pick up a phone call, take a selfie video to post on TikTok, giggle through a Holocaust drama, and sing, sing, sing.

All while forgetting that other people exist and they have equal rights in that space. Not equal rights to behave however they want but to respect the social contract that we don’t be dickheads in public. Shut up.