The acquisition is one way to ensure a market remains for films best seen in theaters.

Follow this authorMegan McArdle's opinions

Now, the story barely made a ripple outside of trade publications and online communities of movie buffs. Which tells you both why this deal went through so easily and why it was arguably needed: because movie theaters have become less and less central to our lives.

Back in the 1980s, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and I was in my teens, “going to the movies” was an activity for people of all ages — which is to say, a group of you decided to go to the movies, and then you decided what movie to see. Because whatever you saw, you’d still have the magic of the movies — the giant screen, the booming sound, the expectant hush of the crowd as the lights went down. You still can’t fully duplicate that at home, but you can get a lot closer than you could in 1984 — or even 2014. So now, many former moviegoers come out only for “event” films such as “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer.” Others never go at all. All of which is clearly visible in declining box office numbers, especially since the pandemic.

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Last year, as Barbenheimer drew people back into theaters, it seemed that maybe the pandemic really had been a blip; maybe it hadn’t actually trained everyone to stay home staring at their screens. Yet when you looked under the hood, the news wasn’t that spectacular. Yes, the overall box office was recovering from its pandemic lows, but it still hadn’t made up all its lost ground. According to Box Office Mojo, the total domestic gross box office was $11.4 billion in 2019. In 2023, it was $8.9 billion. And now it looks as if it’s headed in the wrong direction again: Second-quarter revenue is down by a third from this time last year.

The obvious caveat is that a lot of major productions were delayed by last year’s dual strike of actors and writers. Yet “this is just a temporary lull because of the strike” has some of the same flavor of last year’s “it was just a temporary lull because of the pandemic.” It sure looks as if the pandemic taught some moviegoers to prefer their own couches. And if people must now find alternative entertainments because the strikes have left them with nothing they want to see, some of them might not recover their old cinema habits. There has never been more competition for eyeballs than there is now — not just from network TV and Netflix but also from video games, Twitch streamers, YouTubers, TikTok influencers and probably a bunch of other stuff I’m not hip enough to........

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