There's a place for audience participation, but 'chicken jockey' chaos takes it too far

“Chicken jockey!” If you know what this phrase means, you're either a preteen boy or have accompanied one to a recent cinema screening of A Minecraft Movie.

- Kate Maltby

Warner Bros' latest money-spinner is a movie adaptation of the Swedish game Minecraft, a prerequisite in the social lives of children between the age of eight and 12. The game enables children to explore and reconfigure a creative digital environment, accumulating resources in a world built from blocks. The movie enables children to explore and reconfigure the codes of basic decency in a cinema environment, testing the limits of any hapless usher left to supervise.

A Minecraft Movie means mischief. In recent days, a viral trend has encouraged audiences to wait for the onscreen moment when a zombie jumps piggyback on to a chicken - yes, actually - then to erupt into chaos, hurling popcorn around the theatre. The cue for action is marked by a character played by Jack Black, who spots the zombie-chicken combo and yells “chicken jockey!”. In a video of one such incident, a tween carrying a real-life chicken is paraded on the shoulders of a friend through cinema seats. It was the chicken jockey to end all chicken jockeys.

Clearly, the phenomenon is a nightmare for cinema staff, given the debris of snack foods crunched into carpets. Equally clearly, no adult arrives at A Minecraft Movie with an expectation of rapt silence. The exuberance of children recognising a key moment from their own gameplay should hardly inspire the disapproval some of us reserve for the oaf who disrupts an art house cinema. (I speak as someone with an acute sensitivity to noise and a long-honed repertoire of judgy looks.) A Krzysztof Kieślowski retrospective requires silence; the latest Jack Black vehicle does not.