Since the early 2000s, movie theaters’ profits from around the U.S. have been steadily declining. Reasons for this obviously point towards streaming platforms, and, most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic. This has left a lot of people, including myself, questioning whether or not movie theaters possess any practical reasons to keep them around, as they have little practical reason in our modern age.

First, movie theaters are almost entirely invalidated by the previously mentioned streaming platforms; if a company desires, they can send an entirely new movie straight to a streaming site and be paid for their movie depending on how well it performs. Not only does this eliminate the need to leave your house, but it also gives far more people access to the movie when it first comes out. They may not be able to afford to go to the movie theater and spend up to hundreds of dollars on tickets and other optional things such as snacks. This makes seeing movies far more flexible because all you would need is to pay your subscription fee to your respective platform, while the platform pays the creators of the movie based on how well it does.

Another reason that theaters lack any practical purpose is their inconvenience for the viewer. Not only does viewing the movie itself cost a lot of money, but you have extra things on top of that which inflate the price. There could also potential inconveniences with the scheduling of movies, errors on the part of the employees, and perhaps worst of all, an annoying child ruining the movie for everyone in the theater.

However, one negative aspect of theaters losing money is the shortening of budgets for a lot of films. For example, if a film were to be put up normally in theaters, the tickets themselves would bring in large amounts of money for the creators. Putting it up on a streaming service would lessen the profit gained because instead of the constant flow of tickets and new viewers, it would simply be one large payment. However, this problem could be quickly solved if the streaming services pay the movies based on their current performance on the platform. The chances are if a new movie comes out, large amounts of people will flock to it anyways, resulting in just as much money gained if they can play their cards right.

Overall, the elimination of movie theaters around the country, although it might be depressing, might be good for the many people who don’t want to deal with constant inconveniences at a cinema. With the many problems that it brings, allowing this decline to take its course and run them out of business might not be the worst option we have after all, at least in my opinion.