Evil Week: How to Sneak Food Into the Movies Like a Criminal Mastermind

Welcome to Evil Week, our annual dive into all the slightly sketchy hacks we’d usually refrain from recommending. Want to weasel your way into free drinks, play elaborate mind games, or, er, launder some money? We’ve got all the info you need to be successfully unsavory.

Whether you like lowest-common-denominator Superhero sequels or snobby arthouse cinema, all movie-goers can agree on one thing: The price of multiplex food is too damn high. But you can make movie food nearly free with this one simple trick that theater-owners hate: Bring your own snacks into the movies.

Some basic tips for sneaking food into the movies

The conventional wisdom about sneaking food into movies include no-nonsense tips like:

Bring only items already sold in the theater.Don’t bring anything too smelly.Big pockets are your friend.Stick it in your bag.Sneak food into the theater in your stomach, by eating it first. (I made that one up)

All worthy advice that fails to address the elephant in the multiplex, the one overarching fact that should color all efforts to sneak food into movie theaters: No one actually cares. You need to be a little sneaky, but not that sneaky, because, well, see the preceding sentence.

Can you get in trouble for bringing your own food to the theater?

If you take basic care, there’s little chance you’ll be caught smuggling snacks into a theater, and even if you are, it’s not that big of a deal. Bottom line: You’re unlikely to get in serious trouble for bringing food into a movie theater.

Concession sales may be the multiplex’s main source of profit, but the 17-year-old who rips your ticket almost definitely doesn’t give a shit on a personal level, nor are they paid enough to care on a professional level. They just want to get through the workday without being hassled. So remember the golden rule:

Give employees plausible deniability. You don’t have to hide your cake in a fake pregnancy belly; you just have to make your smuggling easier to ignore than it is to confront. As long as the candy bar isn’t sticking out of your pocket and you’re not eating a whole pizza as you enter, you should be good, even with that bulging hoodie pocket.

There are some important corollaries to this rule:

Don’t be an asshole. If you give someone a reason to not like you, they could be motivated to use their minuscule amount of power to make your evening worse. It’s unlikely, but it could happen. So just smile and say “thank you” when they tear your ticket, and walk on by.Clean up after yourself. In this survey of some theater employees, the main complaint about candy-scofflaws is they leave a mess. Don’t do this; your parents would be ashamed.

What happens if you get caught bringing food into a movie theater?

What if someone does care? What if Jujube sales have been conspicuously low for two months, and the district manager is breathing down the manager’s neck, so she sends the assistant manager out to rip the tickets to show the new-hires how to catch candy-smugglers? Well:

Don’t stress about it. Sneaking food into a theater isn’t illegal, so the worst that could happen is a little embarrassment. They could kick you out, but they’d probably just make you take your snack back to the car, or toss it out, or hold onto it until the movie is over. It’s all very low-stakes.Lie. If you’re confronted by an overzealous employee offended at the presence of the Snickers bar hanging out of your pocket, try saying, “I’m diabetic.” Or “I have extreme allergies.” Say it with friendly confidence while looking them in the eye, and offer no further explanation. Even if what you say it isn’t an explanation or doesn’t entirely make sense, chances are very good the movie theater employees will just wave you through anyway, if only to avoid an unpleasant conversation about your medical condition.Again, don’t be an asshole. This rule actually applies to all interactions with service employees (and everyone else) at almost all times.

Advanced movie theater snack-stealing: Fill a popcorn tub with soda

I don’t advise you to brazenly fill an empty popcorn carton with soda at the self-serve station like TikToker Life According To Eli demonstrates in this video. It violates the “give employees plausible deniability” rule; you’re practically begging someone to say, “hey, you can’t do that.”

And do you really want that much soda? Is the unwaxed popcorn tub going to degrade during Oppenheimer enough to cause a small flood? There’s a lot of potential downside.

On the other hand, it’s pretty funny, and soda prices are so high at the movies that it feels like justice. So if you must push the envelope of movie-theater-concession theft, I recommend ordering a popcorn and asking for an empty tub to share it, so you can at least drink your stolen Dr. Pepper out of a clean cup. And don’t blame me if you get yelled at.

When should you not smuggle snacks into a movie theater?

I guess one could make the argument that it’s a kind of theft to break rules at a theater, but we inhabit a fallen world. Your virtue will only cost you money, and gain you nothing. Hell, movie theater employees sneak food into theaters themselves.

But there is an exception: All of the above advice assumes you’re attending a chain theater where small, concession-related monetary losses are just numbers on a Q3 spreadsheet that will quickly dissolve into a corporate profit scheme in a way you will never understand.

If you frequent an independent movie house, don’t smuggle food. The profit margins for these houses of cinematic worship are razor thin, and concessions sales really are how they make their nut, so the least you can do if you want to eat during a show is buy some Mike N’ Ikes to support them. You have to do your part to keep places like that open.

And if you go to a theater where the “concessions” consist of brownies baked by the owner’s wife, always buy them. They’re going to be good, and also, that’s adorable.