A landmark case, United States v. Paramount, and ensuing consent decrees forced the major studios to divest their theaters back in the late 1940s, hastening the end of the old studio system. Of course, the moviemaking business has changed quite a bit since the ’40s, as the government itself noted in 2020 when the Paramount decrees were finally terminated. With television, DVDs and streaming, people have plenty of ways to watch movies without darkening the door of a cinema. Nevertheless, Khan made her mark, arguing that the government has become far too tolerant of Big Business. It seemed ironic that a major deal uniting studios and theaters was happening on her watch.

The boring answer, as I eventually found out, is that the Justice Department, not the FTC, has historically overseen antitrust in the movie industry. And yet when I thought about it, I was left with a more interesting question — not why the FTC hadn’t stepped in but why this deal had attracted so little attention from anyone.

Ten or 20 years ago, this story would have been big news, not just because the Paramount decrees were still in effect but also because moviegoing was still a major part of American life. People would have been debating how this might change our weekends, our culture, our nation — and it’s a safe bet we’d have heard from a bunch of people demanding (however unnecessarily) that the government do something to protect us, and independent filmmakers, from the reassembly of the old studio system.

Now, the story barely made a ripple outside of trade publications and online communities of movie buffs. Which tells you both why this deal went through so easily and why it was arguably needed: because movie theaters have become less and less central to our lives.

Back in the 1980s, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and I was in my teens, “going to the movies” was an activity for people of all ages — which is to say, a group of you decided to go to the movies, and then you decided what movie to see. Because whatever you saw, you’d still have the magic of the movies — the giant screen, the booming sound, the expectant hush of the crowd as the lights went down. You still can’t fully duplicate that at home, but you can get a lot closer than you could in 1984 — or even 2014. So now, many former moviegoers come out only for “event” films such as “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer.” Others never go at all. All of which is clearly visible in declining box office numbers, especially since the pandemic.

Last year, as Barbenheimer drew people back into theaters, it seemed that maybe the pandemic really had been a blip; maybe it hadn’t actually trained everyone to stay home staring at their screens. Yet when you looked under the hood, the news wasn’t that spectacular. Yes, the overall box office was recovering from its pandemic lows, but it still hadn’t made up all its lost ground. According to Box Office Mojo, the total domestic gross box office was $11.4 billion in 2019. In 2023, it was $8.9 billion. And now it looks as if it’s headed in the wrong direction again: Second-quarter revenue is down by a third from this time last year.

The obvious caveat is that a lot of major productions were delayed by last year’s dual strike of actors and writers. Yet “this is just a temporary lull because of the strike” has some of the same flavor of last year’s “it was just a temporary lull because of the pandemic.” It sure looks as if the pandemic taught some moviegoers to prefer their own couches. And if people must now find alternative entertainments because the strikes have left them with nothing they want to see, some of them might not recover their old cinema habits. There has never been more competition for eyeballs than there is now — not just from network TV and Netflix but also from video games, Twitch streamers, YouTubers, TikTok influencers and probably a bunch of other stuff I’m not hip enough to name.

Those entertainments are also changing the audience, in ways that don’t favor movie theaters. Now, when watching a movie at home, many people scroll at the same time. This is part of what makes home appealing: No one asks us to turn off our phones or stop talking to our partner during the show. You can argue that this way of viewing is inferior to settling into a darkened theater and giving a great director your undivided attention — and I would agree. Unfortunately, I’m not sure everyone else in the audience does.

The more of this we do, the less we’ll want to go to the movies — and the less we go out to the movies, the more we’ll get used to treating them as pleasant background rather than all-encompassing spectacle. Which is ultimately liable to affect the sort of movies that get made, shifting them toward the kind of stuff that works well for distracted home viewing and making it even more difficult to draw people into theaters.

Presumably, this is why Sony is buying Alamo Drafthouse. In the 1940s, owning theaters might have been a way to get a leg up in a booming, competitive market. Today, it seems more like a way to ensure that any market remains for the kinds of movies that need to be seen in theaters. That’s the sort of merger that ought to win the blessing of even the most vigorous antitrust hawk. It certainly has mine.