Everybody knew that Cinderella Man was a sure thing. Starring the Oscar-winning Russell Crowe, directed by the savvy crowd-pleaser Ron Howard, and produced by the team behind Apollo 13 and Ransom, this rousing, uplifting movie about a Depression-era boxing champ couldn’t possibly fail. And yet, earlier this summer, proving the watertight validity of William Goldman’s Tinseltown credo “Nobody Knows Anything,” Cinderella Man didn’t just fail, it tanked.

After four long and bruising weeks at the box office the sports movie had clawed back just $49 million of its reported $90 million (pre-marketing) costs. Industry watchers scrambled for excuses: the movie was badly marketed, the Thirties milieu was drab, and Crowe’s alleged off-screen pugilism was hurting the box office.

And then, controversially, on June 29, one of America’s largest theatre chains, AMC, took the unusual step of announcing that, confident in the knockout charm of Crowe and co, they would refund the ticket price to any movie-goer unsatisfied with the Cinderella Man experience. “We really believe that Cinderella Man is a special picture,” said AMC’s chairman Dick Walsh, “And we want to do whatever we can to help.”

AMC’s refund offer, followed almost instantaneously by a similar offer from the competing US theatre chain Cinemark, is not entirely without precedent: in 1974 the maverick actor-producer-director George C. Scott offered refunds to moviegoers who might be offended by themes of incest implied in his shipwreck drama The Savage is Loose; in 1988 AMC launched their only pre-Cinderella Man refund deal with, bizarrely, the schlocky Julia Roberts vehicle Mystic Pizza; and in 1994 20th Century Fox promised refunds to anyone untouched by Les Mayfield’s syrupy Miracle on 34th Street remake.

Consequently, the genuine surprise here is not the refund offer itself (which, incidentally, didn’t rescue Cinderella Man from box office ignominy), but that it was so comprehensively ignored by the industry.

Hollywood, normally quick to capitalise on all promotional opportunities, didn’t exactly leap on the refund bandwagon. Instead the studio head Tom Sherak came forward and told The Wall Street Journal, definitively, that refunds are bad news. “Giving it to them (the public) for free, or giving them the ability to get their money back is just not a driving force to boost attendance,” he said, recounting the roll call of chancers and schemers who abused the generosity of his studio coffers for the sake of a free ticket.

Yet the essential truth about the Cinderella Man refund, and why it scared Hollywood into silence, is that it raises the ominous prospect of the Walk Out.

Walking out on a running film is inimical to everything that modern movie-going represents. In a world where, pace Jean Cocteau, cinema has become a dream that the whole audience dreams together, with Hollywood as the dominant dream factory, the very notion of walking out of the auditorium has a near revolutionary kick. It defies more than a hundred years of Western cinematic tradition, where lights down in the cinema normally means lights off in the brain. Thus the subversive attraction of the walk out, and one that was possibly missed by the well-meaning owners of AMC theatres, is that it returns to the viewer the intellectual autonomy denied by decades of slick corporate product.

Ultimately, the effects of walking out can only be beneficial — not just for the cinemagoer, but also, conversely, for the very industry that so neurotically scrutinises the activities of its target demographics. Thus to paraphrase Jay Sherman, the tortured film critic protagonist of the long-forgotten animated Simpsons spin-off The Critic, if you walk out of bad movies, they’ll stop making bad movies. But if you walk out of a bad movie, and march right up to the counter and demand a refund, you never know what might happen.

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