According to ABC, “Cloverfield” opened in 278 theaters, using around 500 screens, with most theaters posting the following warning:
“Due to the method of filming used for ‘Cloverfield,’ guests viewing this film may experience side effects associated with motion sickness, similar to riding a roller coaster.”
Anyone who got sick during the movie would get a refund. One viewer described the film as “Blair Witch on crack”, in reference to Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick’s 1999 found footage film “The Blair Witch Project”. Said spectator left after an hour to avoid the extreme vertigo that the film produced in him. Fortunately, the mystery kept the viewer, named Sam Friedman, in his seat: “I stayed for about an hour just to find out what the hell a Cloverfield was.”
It seems that “The Blair Witch Project” provoked similar reactions in the public a decade earlier. A 1999 report in The Guardian also found that moviegoers frequently had to leave the theater due to the shaky camera to drink water and regain their bearings. Theaters showing the “Blair Witch Project” even implored people to throw up in the provided toilets, not in the lobby. Such a posted warning unfortunately means that some poor theater worker definitely had to clean up someone’s sick.
Of course, in both “The Blair Witch Project” and “Cloverfield,” the reports of viewers throwing up served less as a warning and more as a means to enhance the mythic status of both films. The “Blair Witch Project” was so well marketed that some viewers assumed it was a real documentary and that the actors in the film were dead. In 1999, he was briefly the subject of urban legends.