The ethics of going from one theater to another in a multiplex

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I go to the movies often. Sometimes I’ll see something that is terrible or too violent for my tastes. Is it O.K. to walk out and go into another movie? Or even ask for my money back? BLAINE GREENFIELD, BILTMORE LAKE, N.C.

In enormous multiplex cinemas, I see patrons doing this quite often, and I assume their logic is this: They feel as if they’ve paid for a movie, so it’s up to them to decide which movie they see. This would be a justifiable argument if theaters sold tickets for three-hour blocks of time, but that’s not how the world works. Buying a ticket does not award you 180 minutes inside the walls of the building (which you can use in whatever way you want). Your ticket gives you access to a specific movie in a specific location at a specific time. That’s the transaction.

There’s an assumed risk with subjective art. When you buy a ticket for an artistic event, there’s no guarantee that you’ll like it. You can’t argue that the ticket buyer is owed a film experience that meets his or her personal criteria for quality entertainment, because the only guarantee is that the advertised movie will be screened at that place at that time. Your critical opinion does not dictate a refund. And by changing theaters, you’re hurting the creators of the film you saw without directly paying for it. A film’s box-office performance is obviously dictated by box-office sales. If you pay for a bad movie but end up watching a different one, you are rewarding the bad director while taking revenue from the director who made entertainment you liked, in that way incrementally perpetuating the likelihood that more bad movies will be made in the future.

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