Baby’s First R-Rated Blockbuster

Don’t tell Christopher Nolan, but there were at least a dozen people fast asleep last week at a screening of “The Odyssey.”

Others who managed to keep their eyes open were babbling or barely paying attention. Some were drooling.

In defense of Mr. Nolan, who directed the film, these moviegoers were not exactly his target audience. Instead, they were toted along — in strollers, car seats and bouncers — by cinephile parents to one of the few film-going experiences in New York where the sound of a squealing baby would not garner dirty looks.

“It’s hard to see a movie otherwise,” said Stephanie Gittleman, who was attending a 9:45 a.m. screening at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Downtown Brooklyn with her 7-week-old daughter, Romy. “It’s crazy to spend $100-plus on a babysitter just to go to the movies.”

Baby-friendly matinees are a long-running, moderately widespread and infrequently publicized quirk of the movie industry. Alamo has them at each of its 50 locations in the United States, including three in New York City. Nitehawk Cinema, which has two theaters in the city, began offering them more than a decade ago at the request of a local parent group.

Ms. Gittleman’s husband, Aaron Gittleman, heard about the screenings from his sister, who told him they were safe spaces where “babies are allowed to be babies.” The theaters, to that end, turn the volume on the movies down a tad and the lights in the auditoriums up.

Liberated from the strict social codes governing modern moviegoing, Romy and her fellow babies did baby things, with no repercussions. They fussed and cooed during the previews. They breastfed and bounced on their parents’ knees. Zeus willing, they napped.

At one point, during a dialogue-heavy scene depicting the standoff between Odysseus and the sorceress Circe, one mom in the theater, Morgan Belgrave, got up to soothe her crying daughter, Blythe, in the vestibule of the auditorium, craning her neck to catch glimpses of the screen.

“Nobody sails into hell and comes back,” Odysseus was saying, as Blythe wailed in the background.

Odysseus does survive the Underworld. But could he have endured a Brooklyn theater full of fussy infants?

Regardless, for parents of newborns, these screenings can feel like a gift from the gods. Amid ongoing conversations about the livability of the city for young families and a growing awareness of postpartum issues for parents, these theaters provide a few hours of relative normalcy to frazzled moms and dads.

Because for all the joy of those early months, it can also be an exhausting, alienating time.

“We’re huge moviegoers,” said Kendall Clas, who attended the morning screening with her husband, Diego Cordova, and their 3-week-old son, Leonel, “but we haven’t been able to leave the house basically in his infancy.”

The couple, who named their son in part after Jean Reno’s character, Leon, in the 1994 Luc Besson film “The Professional,” expressed hope that more businesses and institutions in the city might adopt baby-friendly policies.

For now, an auditorium full of restless babies is so far outside of moviegoing norms that it can be unsettling for anyone unintentionally encountering one.

Before an afternoon showing of “The Odyssey” that same day at the Nitehawk Cinema in Park Slope, Derek Uy, 23, an acting student from Crown Heights, looked around the auditorium suspiciously as he waited for a friend to arrive. Finally, after observing more of the theater fill in around him, he grabbed his phone.

“Dude, it’s messed up,” he messaged his friend, using slightly more colorful language. “There’s babies everywhere!”

The friend, Carson Zhu, 20, arrived minutes later, poked his head into the theater and solemnly confirmed the situation.

“Oh, yeah,” Mr. Zhu concurred. “There’s hella babies.”

The friends exchanged their tickets for a later showing.

Such mix-ups were not uncommon, Nitehawk staffers said, despite the company’s best efforts to clearly label the “Adults With Infants” series on their ticketing website and in the auditoriums themselves.

Lydia DeKok, a bartender at the theater, said some people even voiced objections to these screenings, perhaps misguidedly, on moral grounds, as these are first-run, grown-up movies, potentially full of cursing and killing and sex.

She recalled an episode in which an older man emerged from an infant-friendly screening of “Mad Max: Furiosa,” the 2024 postapocalyptic action epic, to scold her and her co-workers.

“He was like, ‘How could you let babies watch this?’ ” she said, laughing. “And I’m like, ‘The babies aren’t watching!’”

It is, rather, the parents who are desperate to watch these new films, to keep a foot in the cultural discourse and to still feel, in the words of Grace Hoerner, a mother at the Alamo, “like normal adults.”

“Our friends who don’t have kids are all going to see ‘The Odyssey,’” said Ms. Hoerner, whose 5-week-old daughter, Kira, was asleep on her chest. “We want to be able to say we saw it too.”

Her husband, Felix Frewer, agreed: “It’s hard to avoid spoilers these days.”

Daisy Sun and Justin Shiiba, a couple from Clinton Hill, attended the Nitehawk screening to break up their own monotonous marathon of feedings and naps. They also planned to see “Dune: Part Three” later this year before accepting their fate of “watching ‘Frozen’ on a loop” at home.

Asked if they had a strategy for making it through the three-hour epic that afternoon with their 4-month-old son, August, Ms. Sun laughed.

“We packed like we’re going on a long flight,” she said.

As the previews played at Nitehawk, parents organized their copious, assorted gear and engaged in mini-nesting rituals. Some spread blankets across their laps and pulled out bottles for feeding. They munched popcorn while nudging strollers back and forth in the aisles.

Near the front of the theater, Graham Schneider was angling his 5-month-old son’s car seat toward the back of the room.

“Because of screen time,” he said.

This was the baby’s first movie, but it was, somehow, not his first encounter with the epic poems of ancient Greece.

“When he was a couple days old, I bought a copy of Emily Wilson’s translation of the ‘Iliad’ and read it out loud to him,” said Mr. Schneider, a high school history teacher. “He doesn’t remember it, obviously.”