NPCs Behaving Unusually

@danielr02  Personally, my first move here would be to demolish the movie theater where the sims are all gathering.  If you place a theater somewhere else in town, all the sims that work at the first one will transfer their jobs to the second when you delete the first.  It would also be interesting to see whether sims continued to gather outside the empty lot where the first theater was, or they all headed to the second one, or something else.

When you run this experiment, please use "Save as" and rename the save, so your original remains intact under its own name, then quit to desktop and delete the five cache files in your Sims 3 user folder before reloading the save.  These are the cache files:

• CASPartCache.package
• compositorCache.package
• scriptCache.package
• simCompositorCache.package
• socialCache.package

I'm also curious whether the sims are on the movie theater lot or outside it, and if you can tell what they're focused on as they arrive.  If you reset them and watch them come back, it might be useful to see what they all do when they first show up.  It almost sounds like there's something stuck that's attracting all their attention; the important question is what that is, or at least where it is so you can delete it.

If you use NRaas Tagger or are willing to add it, you could enable tags for all sims in the world, which would by default include their current interaction.