Consumers want to watch movies at home. No lawsuit will change that

I was in last summer’s “Superman” movie. Technically. I’m one of the hundreds of impossible-to-identify background extras who suited up as a soldier for the invasion scene at the end of the film. Still, as a lifelong comic book nerd with Superman artwork hanging on my office walls, it was an exhilarating experience. I even wrote an op-ed about the film, defending Superman’s story as quintessentially American.

Despite all this, I never went to see “Superman” in theaters. I waited a few months and watched it at home. The theater experience is just too expensive and inconvenient to compete with streaming. A similar calculus led my family to skip “Moana 2” and its more recent live-action remake, even though my 6-year-old had seen the first film over a hundred times and has dressed as the titular character for Halloween three years running. We offered her the chance to see each in theaters, but she declined, saying she’d rather wait to watch at home.

Hence, I am highly skeptical of the lawsuit filed by a coalition of 12 state attorneys general that aims to block Paramount Skydance’s acquisition of Warner Bros. given that their argument leans heavily on the merger’s threat to theatrical exhibition. They contend that, by combining two of Hollywood’s five major studios, it will mean higher ticket prices, fewer movies in theaters, and less variety for audiences. They’re wrong.

Granted, there is real intellectual merit to the idea that industry consolidation can be bad for........

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