"The idea has lost its charms long ago and theatres were slowly on their way to death BEFORE the pandemic."

The problem isn’t that the cinema had lost its charms, it’s that the way theatres are operated haven’t really been going the way that’s needed to inspire customers for all but the bigger movies.

You’re correct about concession prices, but this is one place where they’ve been between a rock and a hard place. They know that significantly raising ticket prices will put people off, even if they make their concessions reasonably priced. Then, studios take a cut of the ticket prices before they see a penny (and some studios, such as Disney, demand a much higher percentage than others, so they can’t even give the smaller movies a break and make up any shortfall on the guaranteed blockbusters).

So, the immediate way of making any profit at all is with concessions. Some smaller theatres have carved out niches by, for example, offering full bar service, proper food menus, actual ushers who will go around telling idiots to shut up when they disturb everyone else, but this require upfront investment – and some studios have insisted that studios upgrade the tech and install equipment they didn’t want in order to just get the movies.

This has led to an unfortunate homogenisation of the market as well. You might be interested in watching a new drama or arthouse movie, but there’s only one screening a day that gets displaced quickly to make way for a 4th screen for the new blockbuster, since people are seeing that and not the movie that depends on word of mouth to build an audience. So, because people don’t want to make an 80 mile round trip to the one cinema that’s still playing it, it’s considered a flop and the blockbuster gets the 4th screen from day one next time instead of the more interesting movie.

That’s what’s so silly about some of Scott’s ramblings – if there’s a problem that’s stopping "millennials" from caring as much about the theatrical experience as he does, it’s the direct fault of his employers. The studios he works for have made the theatrical experience a production line that can largely be experienced at home, and their attempts to attract people to cinemas with gimmicks like 3D and 4DX have left the people who would have wanted to experience more subtle works on screen with fewer choices outside the home, and the people who go to them regularly being the ones experienced in theme park ride. He works for Fox and Disney – it’s literally his employers who have created this marketplace, and that’s even without the problem of how badly marketed the film was that he’s whining about here.

"It’s high time studios just say sod off to theatre chains."

Except, it’s more complicated than that, and people who actually care about cinema think the same thing as well – we’re just interested in helping the independents survive. We don’t really care that the multiplexes who put the same movie on 1/3 of their screens (but don’t do anything to make sure projection is up to scratch and people are behaving) are finding it difficult to attract people and that we might be left with only one multiplex playing the same thing as the other 4 used to. We care about the theatrical experience offered by people who care about it – and those are struggling too.