Hundreds of people fled a packed auditorium mid-movie. The culprit was never identified. And the only person who stayed heroic through the whole thing was a guy in a Spider-Man suit.
What Happened
On the night of August 2, at the Cine Colombia multiplex inside the Plaza Bocagrande shopping center in Cartagena, Colombia, a sold-out crowd sat down for Spider-Man: Brand New Day — the biggest movie on the planet, riding the largest opening weekend in box office history.
They made it about halfway.
Roughly at the midpoint of the film, somebody in that dark room let one go. Not a squeaker. Not a polite little seat-cushion sigh. Something structural. Something with reach.
Within minutes, hundreds of moviegoers were pouring out of the auditorium into the corridor, hands clamped over their noses, blinking in the mall lighting like survivors of a chemical event. Footage that hit X the next morning shows the hallway packed shoulder to shoulder with refugees from row J.
The theater never officially canceled the screening. Staff kept the projector running. Every other auditorium in the multiplex operated completely normally, which tells you the problem was not the building — the problem was a person.
And a lot of those ticketholders never went back in. They paid full price to watch Spider-Man save New York and instead walked out because one guy’s lunch declared independence.
The Culprit Has Never Been Identified
This is the part that elevates it from a funny story to genuine folklore.
Nobody knows who did it. No name. No confession. No security footage that could possibly help, because the weapon was invisible. The suspect walked out of that mall in the same crowd as their victims, anonymous, unpunished, and — let’s be honest — probably feeling a lot better than when they walked in.
Two theories are circulating:
- The Prank Theory. Someone brought a stink bomb or a can of fart spray into a packed theater and deployed it for the chaos.
- The Tragedy Theory. Someone simply did not make it to the restroom in time and had to sit very still in the dark while the consequences of their decisions spread outward at a rate of roughly one row per second.
We want it to be Theory 1. We know in our hearts it’s Theory 2.
Online, the internet reached its verdict immediately: the mystery gasser is the movie’s actual antagonist. As one commenter put it, channeling their inner J. Jonah Jameson — “That man is a menace.”
The Cosplayer Is The Hero Of This Story
Here’s the detail that makes this the single greatest news event of 2026.
Standing in that hallway, in the middle of hundreds of gagging, displaced Marvel fans, was a guy in a full Spider-Man costume.
He’d been at the theater doing photo ops. Instead, he got activated. Reports say he stayed in the lobby and kept the evacuated crowd entertained and calm while the situation resolved itself.
Think about the poetry here. A cinema full of people came to watch a man in a spandex suit protect civilians from an invisible threat that nobody can see coming. Then an invisible threat that nobody could see coming attacked the civilians — and a man in a spandex suit protected them.
The suit has no vents, no filtration, and one very small nose hole. He held the line anyway. Give this man an award. Give this man a respirator.
Some Actual Fart Science, Since You Asked
Why can one person clear a room of several hundred?
- Hydrogen sulfide is detectable by the human nose at concentrations of a few parts per billion. Your nose is a better instrument than most lab equipment.
- A sealed auditorium recirculates. Movie theaters run cool, low-turnover air to save on HVAC. Whatever gets released stays in the mix and gets pushed around the room by the vents. The air conditioning wasn’t the solution — it was the delivery system.
- Stadium seating is a slope. Warm gas rises. If you were sitting in the back rows, you were downwind by architecture. There is no fair seat.
- The ingredients matter more than the volume. Sulfur-heavy food — eggs, beans, cruciferous vegetables, red meat, beer — is what turns a routine emission into an evacuation order. A large soda’s worth of swallowed air makes it loud. Sulfur makes it unsurvivable.
Loud is a joke. Sulfur is a crime.
The Bottom Line
Spider-Man: Brand New Day has broken every box office record that exists — biggest opening weekend ever, fastest to a billion dollars, biggest Monday, biggest Tuesday. It will be remembered for years.
In Cartagena, it will be remembered for about ninety minutes, and then for one specific smell.
With great power comes great responsibility. Somebody in that theater had a tremendous amount of power and absolutely none of the other thing.
