Roger Ebert on why box office totals are slipping

High prices and lousy films have become the default explanations, but Ebert says there are other factors. From his blog:

--The theater experience. Moviegoers above 30 are weary of noisy fanboys and girls. The annoyance of talkers has been joined by the plague of cell-phone users, whose bright screens are a distraction. Worse, some texting addicts get mad when told they can't use their cell phones. A theater is reportedly opening which will allow and even bless cell phone usage, although that may be an apocryphal story.

--Competition from other forms of delivery. Movies streaming over the internet are no longer a sci-fi fantasy. TV screens are growing larger and cheaper. Consumers are finding devices that easily play internet movies through TV sets. Netflix alone accounts for 30% of all internet traffic in the evening. That represents millions of moviegoers. They're simply not in a theater. This could be seen as an argument about why newspapers and their readers need movie critics more than ever; the number of choices can be baffling.

Ebert also says that audiences outside large metro areas are thirsting for smaller films - indie, foreign or documentary. Fishbowl LA's Matthew Fleischer is a little skeptical:

We lived in New Orleans for five years-a city with one theater that plays decent indie films. Let's just say those screenings were typically pretty lonely. Would those films have done better if they screened in one of the bigger picture palaces? Doubtful. We saw 127 Hours there last year and there were five people in attendance-all of whom spent nearly the entire film shouting "When is he gonna cut his ahhhm off?"