A Cartagena Theater Evacuated an Entire Spider-Man Crowd Over a Smell Staff Refuse to Explain

Hundreds of Spider-Man fans packed into a Cartagena theater for opening weekend expecting web-slinging heroics.

Within minutes an unbearable stench sent the entire crowd sprinting for the exits.

Staff kept the film running while refusing to explain the smell that had just cleared out their own auditorium.

Screening Emptied Into the Lobby as the Smell Spread

The crowd had gathered at the Plaza Bocagrande complex for "Spider-Man: Brand New Day," the fourth outing for Tom Holland's web-slinger.

Midway through the film, an overpowering odor rolled through the darkened auditorium.

Hundreds abandoned their seats within seconds, many with their hands pressed over their faces, and flooded into the corridor.

A costumed Spider-Man mascot wandered through the displaced crowd outside, turning an evacuation into an accidental photo op.

Reports out of Colombia say the responsible party either lost the race to the bathroom or set off a stink bomb as a prank that got out of hand.

Either way, one set of intestines did more damage to the screening than any villain in the movie itself.

Cinema Refused to Stop the Movie Despite the Chaos

Theater management never canceled the screening.

A large share of the audience simply chose not to return once the smell hit.

No injuries were reported, and every other auditorium in the complex kept running on schedule.

That detail alone says how bad it must have been – an entire room of paying customers decided a superhero movie wasn't worth the smell.

Social media did what social media always does with a story this good.

One commenter wrote there is "no respect any more" left for a stunt that clears out a full auditorium.

Others crowned the anonymous gas-passer the film's real antagonist, upstaging whatever Tom Holland was doing on screen.

Movie Theaters Have Survived Worse Smells Before, Just Never Like This

Hollywood spent decades trying to pump scents into auditoriums on purpose.

AromaRama piped firecracker smoke and incense through a theater's air conditioning system in 1959, and Smell-O-Vision answered a year later with scent-release seats built into the auditorium.

Both flopped, and critics mocked the smell effects as more distracting than immersive.

A Cartagena moviegoer accomplished by accident what those studio engineers never managed on purpose, for free, with side effects nobody signed up for.

Movie theaters have also been cleared out before by people spraying irritants as a prank, from a mace incident at a Calgary screening of "Pirates of the Caribbean" to multiple Toronto-area theaters evacuated the same night over an unidentified aerosol.

Those cases at least came with a suspect on camera.

Cartagena's gas attack walked away clean, and the cinema still doesn't know who to ban.

Somewhere in Colombia there's a person who ruined a superhero movie for several hundred strangers and is currently pretending they had nothing to do with it.

Sources:

• Need To Know staff, "Spider-Man screening EVACUATED after filmgoer suffers extreme GAS," Need To Know, August 3, 2026.
• Staff, "Entire Spider-Man screening evacuated after film-goers' rancid farts cause chaos," The Mirror US, August 3, 2026.
• New York Post (@nypost), "Entire theater evacuated during 'Spider-Man' screening due to moviegoer's uncontrollable bout of 'rotten' flatulence," New York Post, August 3, 2026.