Fight breaks out at Garfield screening and everyone’s making the same joke

Daisy Phillipson
Still from the Garfield Movie and a fight that broke out at an early screening in Spain

A fight breaking out at a Garfield movie screening might not have been on your 2024 bingo card, but it’s happened and now everyone’s making the same joke. 

Garfield – the lazy, lasagna-loving orange cat – is getting the Hollywood treatment with a new animated movie, with Chris Pratt taking on the voice role of the eponymous feline. 

Though The Garfield Movie is a family-friendly affair, an early screening in León, Spain resulted in a violent showdown between two cinema-goers.

In the footage, a man can be seen walking down the theater aisle as two people try to talk him down. Right in front of the screen, another man storms over while pointing his finger. The pair square off before the first guy starts pummelling the second, with fellow attendants eventually splitting them up. At the very end, man one can be seen speaking with other movie-goers.

The video has since gone viral, and it didn’t take long for people to start joking about Garfield’s best and worst things: lasagna and Mondays. 

“Someone forgot to eat their lasagna,” quipped one, while another said, “Must have been a Monday.” A third added, “Someone must’ve eaten all the lasagna.” 

Jokes aside, many wanted to know why the Garfield fight broke out. As asked by one, “HOW could Garfield get people this heated? We need details.”

Since the clip has done the rounds, Spanish boxer Antonio Barrul has since owned up to being the man in the white shirt. As well as apologizing for the incident, he explained what actually happened that day. 

Speaking to Radioestadio Noche, Barrul said he’d been at The Garfield Movie screening with his wife and son when he noticed the man acting “violently and aggressively” towards his partner. When she moved a few seats away from him, he started “yelling at her.”

Barrul saw this and got up out of his seat, telling the man to stop. “He started to threaten me and it got worse and worse until I decided to go down,” Barrul explained. “I couldn’t control myself and what you see in the video happened.”

“I apologized in the cinema and publicly because those images do not make me proud. But you don’t touch a woman,” he added while assuring that “what is shown in that video is not who I am.”

The Garfield Movie drops in theaters on May 24, 2024. For more, check out the movies coming out this month, as well as new films dropping on streaming.

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