Mexico Batman premiere: Fire forces evacuation of cinemas
People walk past a poster of the new Batman movie ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ outside a theater in Silver Spring, Maryland, on July 20, 2012.
GUADALAJARA, Mexico – More than 800 people were evacuated from a cinema in central west Mexico during the midnight premiere of the latest Batman movie, “The Dark Knight Rises,” after a fire started in a trash bin.
The incident in Zapopan earlier today comes exactly a week after James Holmes went on a shooting rampage during the same film in a cinema in Aurora, Colorado, killing 12 moviegoers and injuring at least 58.
An hour into the special midnight screening of the final installment of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, a dumpster located on the third floor of a shopping mall burst into flames, sending smoke billowing into the packed cinema halls, Milenio reported.
Some of the moviegoers thought the smoke alarms were sound effects in the movie.
Firefighters evacuated all the cinema halls inside the plaza in Zapopan, a suburb of Guadalajara, Televisa reported.
No one was reported injured, but clearly moviegoers’ nerves were frayed by the incident.
The screening was held exactly a week after last week’s shooting, which was the deadliest in Colorado since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999. It was the worst mass shooting in the United States in several years.
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