This is a fair observation, but surely you can get a reasonable home theater system (nice new TV, receiver, speakers) for $3k, or less if you're not super picky

This is a fair observation, but surely you can get a reasonable home theater system (nice new TV, receiver, speakers) for $3k, or less if you're not super picky. Assuming it costs at least $10 to go to a movie, that $3k home theater system is 300 tickets, or less than 6 years of going to movies every week. But, regardless of efficiency from a cost perspective, that's not why people get home theater systems. They get home theater systems because they don't like watching movies in movie theaters, and so they can have better experiences watching stuff at home. If you're not intensely annoyed by experience of seeing movies in (typical) movie theaters, then the #1 reason a lot of people get home theater systems isn't applicable to you. When I was a student, seeing movies in crowded theaters never bothered me, but they seem to get more annoying every year. That's probably not the theaters getting worse (they seem to be getting better even?), rather that's just me getting older and my annoyance getting amplified as a result. You experience the same annoyances 1000x, sometimes they cease to be annoyances, or sometimes they become even more annoying each time. Eventually it adds up and you're suddenly a grumpy old person like me who hates crowded movie theaters.