Are movie theaters dead, or is the big screen irreplaceable?

People keep saying the communal experience is overrated, and I think those people has never sat in a theater during a genuinely great quiet scene. Three hundred strangers, total silence, everyone holding the same breath. I felt it during the courtroom scene in my favorite drama last year, and the hair on my arms stood up. No home setup reproduces that, because the silence comes from the presence of other minds attending to the same thing. That's the oldest human magic there is: a crowd, a story, the dark. We've been doing it since firelight.