Should movie theaters make phone-free screenings the default?

The highest-grossing concert film in history made $261.6 million worldwide, and its screenings were the opposite of phone-free. Theaters encouraged fans to sing, dance, and film the whole thing, because the phone was part of the show. InsideHook That is where the theatrical business is actually growing: event cinema, where the audience's second screen is a feature, not a bug. A phone-free default tells the exact customers keeping theaters alive that their kind of fun is wrong. You want to lecture Gen Z about attention spans? They will just stay home, where the phone is welcome and the popcorn is cheap. Theaters do not have an attention problem. They have an arrogance problem.