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

My kids are nine and eleven and they have zero concept of appointment viewing. They grew up on YouTube and TikTok, where everything is on demand, pausable, and skippable. The idea of sitting still for two and a half hours at a scheduled time, in a specific building, surrounded by strangers, is as foreign to them as a rotary phone. Marketing can't fix a generational rewiring of how attention works. Theaters need each new generation to adopt the ritual, and this generation simply isn't adopting it. Give it fifteen years and the customer base ages out.