Please ignore Ryan Gosling’s terrible advice about phone use in theaters
If you’ve been to movie theaters much in the post-quarantine years, you’ve surely seen a certain kind of pre-show message where a stars appears on screen to thank the audience for seeing their film the way they wanted it to be seen: on the big screen. (The funniest case for me was when a pre-recorded Margot Robbie thanked me for seeing her new film Babylon with an audience in a crowded theater. There were three other people there.) The new action-comedy The Fall Guy opens with one of those bumpers, with star Ryan Gosling and director David Leitch bantering about how they had you — yes you — in mind when they made the movie, and that they hope you enjoy it. It’s cute, it’s earnest, and it’s meant to get you excited about the blockbuster you’re about to see.
Except Gosling undermines the whole theatergoing experience by telling audiences that if they really need to use their phones during the movie, it’s fine — they should just try to sort of shield them in their jackets while texting or posting. No! No!!!
Gosling is ceding ground in one of the great battles of our time: the war over movie-theater etiquette. Appeasement doesn’t work when you’re dealing with monsters! We cannot give the using-phones-in-theaters class an inch, or they will take a mile and bathe all of us in their horrid, disruptive, distracting glow!
It isn’t hard to see where Gosling is coming from with this tactical retreat in theaters’ great War on Phones. In addition to being charming, he’s being realistic, meeting modern theatergoing audiences where they increasingly live. Movie theaters are having a hard time luring in audiences, with so many people assuming they can just wait a few months and then watch a given movie on streaming from the comfort of their couch, phone in hand. When viewers who are used to engaging with a second screen at home go to a theater, they often don’t seem to see anything wrong with pulling out their phone to answer a quick text, check the time, or even record parts of
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