Movie Theater Mistakes La Llorona for Detective Pikachu, Traumatizes Children
A movie theater in Montreal, Quebec, made an unfortunate mistake when they accidentally switched The Curse of La Llorona with Detective Pikachu, traumatizing the audience full of young children. The crowd that just wanted to hear Ryan Reynolds and see some cute pocket monsters was instead shown something that could not clash more with the audience in the theater that day.
Detective Pikachu brings the popular and long-running Japanese franchise to life, in a mix of live-action and 3D animation. The film is somewhat canon with the show, as Japanese actress Ikue Ōtani returns to voice Pikachu, alongside Reynolds, and many other fan favorite Pokémon can be found in the movie as well. The Curse of La LLorona, on the other hand, is an R-rated horror film in the Conjuring universe, based on a terrifying folk-legend throughout South and Central America. The fact that the unlucky movie theater played a film to a group of children, which is based on a story typically intended to scare children, is almost too ironic to be true.
Screen Rant's own Ryan George was at the viewing in Montreal, documenting the entirety of the unfortunate event as it unfolded on Twitter. It began with the trailers, which included Annabelle Comes Home, Child's Play, and Joker, and when the movie finally started playing, the audience was surprised to discover that Detective Pikachu had been replaced by The Curse of La Llorona. Check out Ryan's Twitter thread below:
One can only imagine the predicament the theater found themselves in, but they eventually realized their mistake and moved the audience to a new theater - not before some children in the audience had started crying, though. And, just to add to the technical difficulties that evening, when the audience was moved to the new theater, Detective Pikachu was paused on the screen, mid-movie.
Now that the mistake has been made, other theaters will likely make efforts to ensure a similar error does not occur when showing Detective Pikachu, or any other family-friendly film for that matter. The film is expected to do extremely well in the box office, and a mistake on this level isn't likely to have any lasting negative effect. As for the poor kids involved, they hopefully weren't too traumatized, and were still able to enjoy Detective Pikachu, despite their recent traumas.
Source: Ryan George