publicenemy#1 mentioned a blurry projectionist error for TG, and it reminded me of some of my experiences in the past. Slop. Asleep at the wheel. Projector breakdowns. And incidents at the ticket booth.

I saw Red Dragon back when. The lights dimmed. The film started. Dr. Lector is seen in tux, sitting in the audience at a classical performance. But personnel manning the AMC theater projectionist booth flicked the wrong switch.
The picture was up, but the film's soundtrack was turned off; replaced with Country Music. This continued for 5+ minutes, up until Wil Graham discovers the nature of Lector's "Home Security".

I got a refund for that.

I cannot remember what the film was but I went to my local cinema with my brother once and the film couldn't play. Some people got pissed off and demanded the management come and apologise. Me and my brother just walked out and collected our free tickets to see it another time. I think it was for something like The Kingdom. Nothing important.

The projectionists are never usually the problem. It's the fucking audience that I wish would fuck off or shut up.

The thin red line. The print burned through a scene. Got a refund or free ticket.

Revenge of the Sith OD comes to mind. The film was extremely blurry in the first two auditoriums I tried to see it in. Got lucky with the third one on a showing a half hour later.

Superman Returns was another one. There was an awful smell in the theater, and the film just stopped playing 3/4 of the way through. We sat there for 15 min. waiting for it to come back on. We got a free ticket to come back with for that issue.

More recently I had a problem with 2 Guns. We got to the diner scene and then the picture quit (but the audio was fine). Someone came in and said they had to restart it from the beginning. The film got to the same point and it happened again. They asked if we wanted to try one more time, which we did... and it obviously happened again, so they canceled the showing. They were kind in giving us a refund and a free ticket to come back, and they also told us to go see whatever was playing at the time.

Wow, nghtvsn has an awesome memory. Seventeen years have passed and the scar remains.

The Tuxedo - About 3/4's grouch the film the picture started to drift to the left for a few second. The film then burnt up. That's the only time I've seen that happen. We got a refund.

Forget the movie - The "projectionist" forgot to turn on the film at the start. Multiple people (including myself) went out and asked what was going on, and at least when I asked no one seemed to know what was going on. 30 minutes later the trailers and then the movie started.

Interstellar (Fathom Events) - There was a problem with the download the movie theater received and they had to download it again. When all was said and done it took about 90 minutes, but at the start they allowed us to roam around and go in any movie we wanted. I got a refund.

I think something similar happened when I watched Joe Dante's The Hole. The audio was fine, but the video was scrambled green blocky mess. They fixed it in about 10 minutes. They said the got the wrong key to unlock the file or something like that. The funny thing is nobody even mentioned anything even though all you could see were green blocks. I just got up and went to tell them there's something wrong with the movie.

This local cinema, pretty new and decent one actually, cleaned or didn't clean the screen or something. During Tomorrowland a thin white line was vertically visible somewhere near the middle of the screen. So, happened in China, and no refund, free ticket or anything like that, comes with the territory.

Well if I mentioned every slight imperfection on screens in China, I'd have a list longer than Lecter's post count.

The last Hobbit film stopped and they put it back on 20 minutes earlier. Fucking torture.

Me and Orson Welles was the only time I saw the print burning up. Happened about 15 minutes before the end. Got a refund, then a week later, snuck into the film 20 minutes or so before the end.

In addition to TG, the previews before I saw Inside Out started in 3-D. I think I was the only one who got up and told an employee about it. They stopped the 3D trailers and started the whole batch of trailers over again in 2D.

When I saw Deathly Hallows Part 2 at midnight it was a nightmare. They started playing the advertisements that show before the movie when the trio started changing out of their wet clothes and the whole theater started screaming. They ended up restarting the movie after half an hour of darkness and loud chatter, and we didn't get out of that theater until almost 4 in the morning. We got free tickets though.

Not a projectionist blunder, but a guy shat himself once, one row away from me. I think it was during Be Cool.

Oh, this is a fun topic. While I mostly have boring movie showings where everything goes right, I have had some "fun" experiences.

When we saw Apollo 13, there were temperature problems for a good chunk of the movie. I was 7, so I don't know exactly what was going on, but far as I can gather, first the air conditioning stopped working, so since this was July in California, the theater got quite hot. Then they got the air conditioning working, but it was cranked up all the way, so the auditorium got really cold. As far as I remember, they didn't stop the film or have anyone come in to explain the problem, it just kept running as if nothing was happening. When we got out of the movie at the end, my family all commented that the temperature problems happening while the Apollo crew was in danger in the movie actually seemed fitting.

When I saw Phenomenon, the film broke during the final scenes. I don't know if we got to the actual ending of the movie, I don't believe Travolta had actually died yet. (This was one of several "grown-up" movies we went to see because I was intrigued by the trailer. Often, these would turn out to be more boring than I thought, or something like that. I just thought it was going to be "John Travolta gets magic powers", not turn into a weepy drama "John Travolta's powers are the result of a brain tumor that is killing him". So I was actually somewhat glad the film broke so I didn't have to finish it.)

(Coincidentally, later in '96 my parents went to see Ransom at the same theater without me, and they ended up having to go to another theater in another town to see the movie because...the film broke during their showing. In both of these cases, the theater apparently wasn't able to repair the print, because otherwise wouldn't either showing have resumed when the print was fixed?)

I saw a showing of Star Wars Episode I at the then-new Metreon in San Francisco (back when it was the Sony Metreon, and when the theater was still Loews, pre-AMC). It was one of the craziest screenings I've ever been to. The screening started something like 20-30 minutes behind schedule - they tried and failed to start the trailers several times. One time they got the picture running but no sound. Another time they got the sound running but no picture. I seem to recall that they stopped a couple times. And they didn't get the house lights off until some time during the first reel of the movie. The Metreon is now consistently one of the highest-attended movie theaters in the country, but in '99 they were clearly still working out the bugs. (Either at that screening or another one, they served popcorn out of a storage unit built into the snack counter that had glass on the counter side facing the customers. The problem is that they didn't fully wipe off all of the Windex when they cleaned it, so our popcorn smelled - and maybe even slightly tasted - like Windex.)

At Captain America: The Winter Soldier last year, they forgot to open the curtains/black masking to the full CinemaScope width, I couldn't quite tell during the trailers since they seemed to be pillarboxed. When the movie started, I realized the curtains weren't fully open, so I had to go out and tell them (since I was apparently the only person in the audience who even noticed!) This theater doesn't open/close the curtains depending on aspect ratio anymore, they just project the image onto the fully exposed screen with the letterboxing/pillarboxing fully visible.

I've been to two films where the film burned out: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and The Ruins.

There have been plenty of audio/visual issues that I've encountered. Most recently during Pitch Perfect 2 where the sound stopped for a good minute or so, but it was rewound and everything was fine.

One I forgot.

Hardball - The projectionist showed the film in the wrong aspect ratio and the sound was pitched too high for the first 15 minutes. If anyone remembers, the first 15 minutes are supposed to be somewhat dramatic and serious with Keanu's character losing a whole bunch of money to a bookie and it just played the exact opposite way since all the characters were distorted (they looked like short stubby people if I remember) and sounded like they were on helium.

Broken chairs, even more common...arrrggghhh

I saw Gravity in a way too chilled auditorium, I felt fricking cold...but it too fitted very well with film, and I couldn't really complain about it in the end.

100% of 3D glasses have scratches and smudges and therefore you cannot watch the movie.
100% of arm rests are hardy and uncomfortable.
70% of chairs are broken or uncomfortable.
50% of screens are shit.
30% of cinemas don't have enough leg room (usually older cinemas).

The sorrows of cinemas in China...endless.

when i was a projectionist i dropped a print of the omen on the projection booth floor. had to cancel the screenings for that evening.

Yeah, that Red Dragon country music incident went on for 5+ minutes. The audience shouted out (at the projection booth). But there was no response. And this is because, when a few of us got up and went out to the lobby, we discovered "Multiplex Syndrome".

There was Nobody in the projection booth. They were understaffed that night, and the projectionist was manning 9 or more screenings.

And print burn. Man, does that ever bring back memories! Many years ago there was a revival house in the nightly fog by the sea in Venice, Ca, known as The Fox Venice, and it was very popular with the local film students from U.C.L.A. and U.S.C. The lobby was often filled with technological discourse about the films being shown that night and the various artistic merits and approaches.
The students with their eyes on the prize were crimping for study. Every night was usually a revival double bill, from Casablanca to M.A.S.H., Ken Russell's The Devils, and even H. Gordon Lewis gore festivals with freshly minted prints. We could start a whole topic about the revival houses and glitter palaces of old. Suffice to say, throughout the 1970's, The Fox Venice was my "Cinema Paradiso". Cinema Treasures is a good site, dedicated to the memories of these palaces.
Please note that the picture of the long-closed "Fox Venice" location on the following page is of the current 'Fox Venice Swap Meet', though they at least preserved the former theater's mantle design. It serves as an injustice to what the theater used to look like. The removal of the foyer and ticket booth under the neon and lights was a rape of culture:

http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/1137

One night during a screening of "The Groove Tube" (a 70's spoof of American television and it's ethics), the projector sputtered during the "P.B.S. roundtable" vignette. With a wrenching screech that could be heard throughout the auditorium, the projector froze, holding a mid shot of talking heads. And then, a brown spot appeared, with bubbling. And then a Brilliant burst of flame that actually projected onto the screen. This was The Fox Venice, also known for psychedelic light shows and events, and so, many in the audience broke out the smokes and the tokes and the bottles of Tokay, and we enjoyed the madness. There was applause.

The projectionist flicked on a reel-tp-reel Quad multi-track of music from "A Clockwork Orange", while deftly swapping out the projector and threading the remaining film past the burn point, after a judicious snip to remove the damaged end. Expert!
The audience then applauded that.

In '71, a local college staged a fundraiser with a showing of the film, M*A*S*H*. It was screened in the student's room. It was a CinemaScope print projected with a standard aspect lens onto a bedsheet. Hawkeye and Trapper John looked very thin, though the football game looked just about right, from the bench....

I was hating that movie when I first saw it so I was actually glad that thing ended when it did. I learned to enjoy it more though as time has gone by.

I remember the End of Days trailer played before Pokémon: The First Movie, and a lot of parents were angry.

resident seems to have some stories to tell. Interesting fella.