Imagine you and your child are sitting in a theater, popcorn in hand, excitedly waiting for the new Spongebob Squarepants movie to start playing, but when the movie finally starts, it’s actually ‘Fifty Shades of Grey”, an R-rated sexually explicit movie known for it’s S & M theme. Ummm… run out as fast as possible?
That’s exactly what happened on Monday morning at the MetroLux 14 theater in Denver. Joe Jaramillo was there with his granddaughter waiting to see the new ” The Spongebob Movie: Sponge Out Of Water” film. He noticed that all of the previews had a romantic theme to them, but didn’t think too much of it, until the movie started and the title “Fifty Shades of Grey” emblazoned the screen.
He tells the Denver Post, “People ran out of there,” Jaramillo said with a laugh. “You could hear little kids going, ‘SpongeBob! SpongeBob!’ as the parents were dragging them out.”
Staff was alerted, and the movie was quickly shut down before any questionable scenes were viewed. The screen went blank and was then replaced with kid friendly trailers.
“What was interesting is they have the policy you can’t take a kid into an R-rated movie,” Jaramillo said. “Some of the trailers were coming up R-rated.”
David Corwin, president of Metropolitan Theatres, said that there was a chip problem with the server and somehow the wrong movie started playing.
Sometimes theaters will hand out complimentary passes when mishaps occur, but because this was handled quickly with no harm to the children present, no one received any freebies this time around.
image released by Universal Pictures
