Stop Taking Your Shoes Off in the Movie Theater

The Alamo Drafthouse in Downtown Brooklyn was busy on Monday night. Stylishly dressed patrons filtered out of an event in the theater’s bar, while guests milled about in the lobby, happily debating You Can See Everything and Wicker.

At the center of the hubbub, surrounded by standees for Godzilla Minus Zero and I Play Rocky, was an unusual sign, placed on a stand about six feet in front of the employee responsible for checking tickets. In all caps and zero punctuation, it read:

“SHOES MUST BE WORN AT ALL TIMES INSIDE THEATERS”

That is not a good sign. No one posts a reminder to customers like that proactively. You only take that kind of drastic action after you have had multiple problems with people waving their naked toesies around in your movie theater. This wasn’t the only “NO SHOES NO SERVICE” sign at the Alamo, either. All but one of the seven auditoriums on the Brooklyn Alamo’s top floor had an identical sign hung by the door.

Equally amused and nauseated, I took a picture of the sign in the lobby and posted it to my Instagram account. I have never gotten more DMs about anything I have ever posted in 15+ years on Instagram, not even the photo of Timothée Chalamet pancakes slathered in purple goo.

Some of the response were simple vomit or gritted-teeth emojis. Others shared horror stories. One friend told me that on a recent trip to a theater, the person seated next to them not only took off their shoes, but their socks as well. A colleague revealed that they just had dealt with a foot nudist at a screening of You Can See Everything. And a longtime film industry veteran told me that when they worked at an art house theater several years ago people removing their shoes was a “constant issue.”

What’s worse, they said, was that one time they “caught someone clipping their toenails in theater too.”

(Should I have put a trigger warning on this post? That was an oversight on my part, sorry.)

As gross as these stories were, they were also kind of reassuring — because in the last few years I’ve watched in horror as people all around me have started de-shoeing with increasing regularity. A few months ago at a screening of The Invite — at this same Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn, come to think of it — I sat next to a woman who casually tossed her shoes to the ground once the lights dimmed in the auditorium. Thankfully, her dogs were not barking, aromatically speaking. But she did start picking at her toes at one point and that was a wee bit distracting/disgusting.

Until these sign popped up in the Alamo, I assumed I was the only one who found this behavior extremely off-putting. It just seemed like the social contract had shifted at some point, and going barefoot in the movies had somehow been shifted onto the list of acceptable movie-theater activities. Barefoot in the park or a Gene Saks romantic comedy? That’s one thing. But in a movie theater? Where you are in close proximity to many strangers four hours at a time, and where seating is now often assigned in advance so you can’t simply get up and move to another empty seat if the dude next to you decides now would be a good time for a DIY pedicure?

It didn’t sit well with me. But I appeared to be alone on a well-shod island on the matter, because the more I went to the theater the more frequently I observed this behavior. Frankly, I have had far more issues over the past few years with footwear (or the lack thereof) in theaters than with loud patrons or cell phone usage.

As to the matter of why this has become more prevalent, I have to assume it has something to do with more and more people returning to theaters after a prolonged period of watching movies almost exclusively at home. During the pandemic, theaters across the world shut down and cinephiles were forced to fend for themselves.

Every movie lover sets their own rules in their personal home theater. Now, with attendance on a upswing, multiplexes are luring bringing back customers who got a little too comfortable screening films at home. Or maybe this is a symptom of the broader incivility that has infected so many aspects of public life over the last decade.

(Could the rise of Crocs also play a contributing factor? Those things are far too easy to take on and off. They’re like slippers that society has deemed socially acceptable for out-of-home use. In my personal experience, I would estimate that one out of every four shoeless theater patrons is wearing Crocs.)

Whatever the reason, I am glad that someone decided to, uh, put their foot down. Follow the signs. Keep your shoes on. It’s a movie theater, not a damn Quentin Tarantino movie.