My town lost its only theater in 2019, before the pandemic even started. The nearest one now is forty-five minutes away, which turns a movie into a half-day expedition with gas money. For huge parts of the country, this debate is already over. Streaming didn't kill our theater. Simple arithmetic did: a 200-seat building in a town of eight thousand can't survive on four blockbusters a year. The obituaries focus on cities, but the extinction started in small towns, quietly, years ago.
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