Today’s read is from Christian Toto at Hollywood in Toto. Here’s an excerpt:

People stopped going to the movies this year in alarming numbers, and it got worse as the holidays approached.

The raw numbers tell the story.

The gross for 2022 domestic now looks like $7.5 billion, perhaps 15 percent lower than the year’s lowball $8.5 billion projection and far off the $11.2 billion of 2019 (which, at today’s ticket prices, would be over $13 billion).

What changed?

This critic reached out, via Twitter, for some informal reactions to a simple question: Why did you stop going to the movies? The answers suggest a near-perfect storm of causes that go far beyond fears of the waning pandemic.

Read the entire column here.