The only time the audience reacted in a movie was when Rohan arrived in RotK.
The audience never reacted to anything else in my entire life of movie viewing.
Someone in here earlier said their theater gave a standing ovation. That seems all sorts of ridiculous to me. I've been at (hell, I've hosted)
premiere screenings with filmmakers in attendance and I haven't seen that ever, much less for basic opening night films.
I hosted a Thanksgiving eve screening of "The Muppets" with an audience that had islands of spontaneous Kermit Flailing break out at least 3 or 4 times before the trailers started, and when that movie ended (it played wonderfully, lots of laughs and cheers at favorite characters appearing) there was a brief flare of applause, and then people got up and started leaving. I presented a 35mm screening of The Empire Strikes Back with a local division of the 501st helping us introduce the picture, 600 strong Star Wars nuts packed into the auditorium. Cheers and whoops at all the right moments. Movie ends - four or five seconds of cheers and applause... and people got up and left.
The idea that a couple hundred people gave
this movie a standing ovation is all sorts of implausible, to me. That's a level of emotional engagement that is pretty goddamned rare, honestly. Especially considering the recipient of said outpouring is a flat screen with light being shone onto it.
But then again, I'm willing to bet a good 70% of all "This is what my crowd did" reports on any forum/messageboard are "here's the outward emotional exhibition I'm going to ascribe to the whole crowd as an extension and exaggeration of my own personal feelings."
It's how one guy snickering in the front right becomes the entire front half of the theater bursting out into laughter. It's how one guy yawning two aisles down becomes half the theater falling asleep. And it's how one guy muttering "yeah right" at the end of the movie becomes the poster standing up and shouting a finely crafted bon mot of Whedonesque proportions that is immediately roared at and lengthily applauded.
Basically, I don't buy a lot of these crowd reports. You have to disengage from the movie (like I did to be able to relay those anecdotes about Muppets and Empire) to
some extent to pay the level of attention needed to accurately report some of the shit I see regarding the audience as proxy. Cheers and whoops? Bursts of applause? Yeah, that makes sense. Whole groups of people spontaneously giving
standing ovations to the scrolling credits? Nah.