‘Cloverfield’ spoiler in New York City subway

Hey, you wanna know how Titanic ends?

The ship sinks.

What kind of candy-stealing, ponytail-pulling, wedgie-yanking numbnuts does this kind of thing?

The first major instance I recall where people were deliberately spoiling a movie was for Basic Instinct, way back in 1992. Some gay and lesbian groups were really upset that the movie portrayed lesbians as being a bunch of psychos and murderers (it is true that pretty much every lesbian/bisexual woman in the movie was a murderer), so they went around telling everyone they could the ending of the movie, so that (presumably) people would not see it.

It didn't work.

I think it's called the age of "information". In a way, your subway spoiler seems to have been indulging him/herself in the exact kind of omni-present "we are all chroniclers of culture" sort of approach that the movie itself is (tangentially) about. The levels of meta are making my head hurt.

Hey Mj I saw cloverfield and , I didnt love it as much as others.However it did leave me curious. How did they manage to get the extras they got, running around like freaks in the middle of NYC without getting any kinda buzz as to traffic trouble or regular people on the street wondering whats going on? Because I remember when War of the worlds was filming in Hoboken there was alot of people wondering what was going on with all the lighting effects.

HDJ, since a lot of the stuff in the movie is CGI, the extras would have no idea what they were running from; they'd just be told, run this way and act like you're scared. The fact that the entire movie is shot on handheld video cameras means that there's not a huge requirement for things to be excessively choreographed; in fact, you wouldn't want that because the movie is supposed to appear spontaneous.

thats not what i ment,, how like how come nothing was said when the blocks got shut down for the movie

SPOILER ALERT FOR HARRY POTTER FANS WHO SOMEHOW HAVEN'T YET READ BOOK 6:
A day or two after the 6th Harry Potter book came out, someone spelled out "Snape kills Dumbledore" by sticking paper cups in a chain-link fence on a highway bridge.
I've always hated Harry Potter, so I got a good laugh out of it.
My guess is that the perp was either offended or excited by the hype, and then disappointed by the final product. I can understand (but not always sympathize with) this mindset; who hasn't wanted to destroy something that disappointed them (I'm looking at you, Phantom Menace)? And who isn't sick of the relentless, undeserved hype of just about any pop-culture item you can name?
What I don't get is how this particular spoiler managed to get the details wrong. Do hype and disappointment affect morons as well as normal people?

Ah, so being a brat is meta now, is it?

It is if you're so completely cool in your own bratness that you're convinced that your bratty actions are simply social commentary on the bratty-ness of others.

HDJ, people knew that a movie was being filmed. This happens all the time in NYC. They just keep everyone who didn't need to know the details in the dark. Most, if not all, of the effects were added after the fact, so really only the principal actors and crew needed to know anything at all.

"What kind of candy-stealing, ponytail-pulling, wedgie-yanking numbnuts does this kind of thing?"

What kind of lousy one-shot movies have we got used to, that knowing how it ends can ruin the whole experience? Guess nobody will be buying the DVD, then?

(And a good thing too, I think, but then I got fed up with shaky-cam well before Battlestar Galactica made it cool again.)