The first moment in my life when people began to talk about movies as if they could go away tomorrow was right after the pandemic struck. At that point, no one knew which end was up, but with America’s movie theaters having closed down, movies had gone away — at least temporarily. We all wondered: For how long? Theater chains were facing the kind of crippling debt that can hollow out an industry; they still are. And even after the theaters reopened, and moviegoers (or some of them, anyway) returned, the seemingly permanent erosion of the box office reflected a much larger story: the transition of audiences from the movie theater to the home theater, a technology-driven development that was also a cultural evolution. Call it The Cocooning of America.
