Hollywood screenwriter and director Paul Schrader revives a Dish thread:

Films were never communal just because people wanted a communal experience‒it just happened to be the economic model that made the most sense. You could sell a lot of tickets and show the film at the same time to everyone. On a nickelodeon, of course, which predated movie theaters, only one person could watch the movie at a time. Nobody said, ‘We want to sit in a hot room together!’ That’s just how it was. But it doesn’t have to be that way anymore. You know, this myth that people will always want to go out to the movies, they’ll always want a communal experience‒I don’t know that that’s necessarily true. … I always prefer to go to an empty theater‒I’d rather go to an eleven o’clock matinee than an eight o’clock show, so I don’t have to be there…