A Spider-Man: Brand New Day screening in Cartagena was evacuated over a moviegoer's flatulence
A packed Friday-evening screening in Cartagena emptied into the lobby after an unidentified audience member produced an odor the New York Post called "rotten" — and a Spider-Man cosplayer ended up out there with everyone else.
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Most superhero blockbusters have, by this point, been through a few different kinds of opening-weekend disaster. The standard list is well known: a leak, a bad review cycle, a cyberattack on the booking system, a print missing a reel. The list now has a new entry, and it is not one the marketing department is going to want printed on the poster.
On August 2, 2026, a screening of Spider-Man: Brand New Day at the Cine Colombia multiplex inside the Plaza Bocagrande shopping center in Cartagena, Colombia was evacuated after an unidentified audience member produced what the New York Post described as a “rotten” bout of flatulence that filled the darkened auditorium with an odor bad enough to drive film fans out into the hallway. The screening, by all accounts a normal Friday-evening show in a packed room, broke into something else entirely once the smell hit. Hundreds of patrons reportedly fled the theater; TMZ independently confirmed the evacuation, noting that the offending gas was described in some tellings as “Green Goblin”-style, which is either a coincidence or a writer in Cartagena having a better day than the rest of the room.
The cosplay subplot is almost worth the price of admission on its own. A Spider-Man cosplayer was in the audience, and according to the Post’s account ended up in the lobby along with everyone else; TMZ added that a Peter Parker cosplayer also left the theater, which is the kind of detail that, in any other story, would be the lede. The culprit has not been identified, and it is unlikely that they will be — partly because nobody in a darkened theater can pin a smell to a specific seat, and partly because the social cost of being publicly identified as the person who cleared a Spider-Man screening with their flatulence is roughly permanent.
What is genuinely interesting about the incident is how it split the room. According to TMZ’s reporting, some theatergoers actually returned to finish the film once the air had cleared; most left before the credits. Which is to say the smell, however extreme, was a survivable condition for a chunk of the audience, and the evacuation was less a forced removal than a mass vote of no confidence in the next ninety minutes. There is something almost democratic about it: a few hundred strangers in a darkened room, all weighing whether the next scene was worth a nostril-full of whatever was happening two rows back, and most of them deciding it was not.
The story has the markings of one of those pieces of news that is going to travel further than the incident warrants, partly because the genre has been waiting for it. A superhero film, a cosplayer, a mass evacuation over bodily function — the components are almost too clean. But both outlets that covered it agree on the basic facts: a Cartagena theater, an August 2 screening, an unidentified audience member, and an auditorium that emptied itself out. The only detail in dispute is which specific superhero costume was in the lobby at the time, and that is the kind of disagreement that the universe can probably live with.
What the studio will do with the publicity is the more interesting question. Brand New Day is, by any reasonable measure, going to open to a massive box office regardless of what happened in Cartagena — one screening in Colombia is not going to move the needle on a global release. But there is now a small, persistent piece of the internet that associates this particular film with the phrase “the one where someone farted the theater empty,” and that is a piece of the internet the marketing department would have preferred not to exist.