Are the movies dying?

Let me rephrase that. Are movies the way we have understood them for several generations -- as suspenseful and/or comic and/or soul-altering shadow plays shared by large audiences in theatrical settings -- in their red-star end stage? {bull} Don't dig the grave just yet, but, yes, they probably are. {bull} This is more than standard, cyclical hand-wringing. Movie theaters are enduring their worst slump in two decades: Despite such recent opening-week successes as ''Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith," ''Mr. & Mrs. Smith," and ''Batman Begins," summer box office is down 10 percent from 2004, and the year as a whole is down 7 percent. True, a little movie called ''The Passion of the Christ" skewed last year's figures, but grosses have been dropping for three years now, and, worse, after you adjust for inflation, it becomes clear that attendance is down even further, anywhere from 8 to 10 percent depending on who's talking. {bull} People are simply not going to the multiplex as often as they used to. The question is not only why but whether the trend is reversible or if it's part of a much larger cultural shift in the way we entertain ourselves. Results of an AP-America Online poll released this month strongly supported the latter, with 73 percent of respondents saying they prefer to watch movies at home and only 22 percent saying they would rather go to a theater.

The easiest explanation for the slump is that the movies have gotten lousier, and, indeed, almost half the AP-AOL respondents agreed with that sentiment. It's hard to dispute when you're limping from the combined onslaught of ''House of Wax," ''A Lot Like Love," and ''The Longest Yard." Oddly, Hollywood feels comfortable with this argument since it implies that better movies will fix everything. The studios are certain they can do that, as long as ''better" means bigger and noisier.

Nostalgia aside, though, movies aren't really demonstrably worse than five years ago, or 10, or 20. (This argument stops holding water when you get to 1939.) Spring 2005 also brought us ''Sin City," ''Kung Fu Hustle," and ''Cinderella Man," big-screen experiences that do what they set out to do with skill and creativity. In our selective cultural memory we forget not only the terrible films that came out when we were young but also the endless reels of mediocrity. They weren't all ''Chinatown," Jake. Many of them were ''Freebie and the Bean." Never heard of that one? I rest my case.

Another much-bandied argument is that going to the movies is less pleasurable than it used to be. Now we're getting somewhere. When my wife and daughters and I head to the multiplex to see the latest Pixar or ''Fever Pitch" or what you will, the experience is often about everything but the movie. It's about costly tickets, snacks priced at three times the market rate so the theater owner can cover his ''nut," 20 minutes of aggressively loud commercials and coming attractions, followed by a print unspooling with a big green gouge in it while two morons in the row behind us talk about somebody named Denise. In the early 21st century, that's entertainment, and that's a problem.

Granted, you have to feel for the theater owners; film exhibition is a hard business with a nasty profit margin, and the studios hold most of the cards. Expensive popcorn and commercials can sometimes mean the difference between solvency and a dark screen.

But -- and here's the nub of the dilemma -- why should we put up with it when the home-viewing experience can be as good, if not superior? Why shell out $40 for sticky floors when you can buy the DVD for $20 and watch it on your plasma TV with Dolby 5.1 surround sound? Or punch it up on-demand for $4.95 and pause whenever you need to run to the kitchen? The medium has evolved, as mediums do, in the direction of ease and efficiency. If there's still a reason to go to a movie theater -- call it communal dreaming -- exhibitors are chipping away at it to make their weekly payroll.

Worse, with the gradual shortening of time between the theatrical and home-video ''windows" -- once it was a year before you could rent a copy; now the norm is four months -- there's little incentive to see a movie early. Hollywood doesn't care, since the studios make almost three times as much money from DVDs than from movie theaters; while the box office has been sagging, DVD sales and rentals have increased 676 percent since 2000. In effect, the big-screen version now functions as an ad to raise brand awareness for the home-video release.

You can still get teenagers and college kids into theaters if you promise sensation and star-wattage; for the under-30 crowd, going to the movies remains an accepted social event. A lot less than it used to be, though, because competition is fierce. The multiplex is one diversion out of many, including the Internet (usage up 76 percent in five years) and video games (up 20 percent). Now that TiVo and other digital video recorders have broken the shackles of television's programming grid, it's possible to stay home and catch that episode of ''Gilmore Girls" you missed. Or you could just illegally pirate films off the Net.

As for grown-ups, the film industry has by and large written them off. This may be a smart business move -- most of my peers are too exhausted to do much beyond popping in a Netflix movie and falling asleep 30 minutes later -- but it leaves filmmakers and audiences with depressingly few options. In the Hollywood calendar, there is Academy Award season and there is the rest of the year, with the Oscars continuing to represent the industry's lip service toward quality product. It's worth noting that the major studios no longer bother with straight-up dramas and awards bait, leaving such films to boutique wings that know how to turn a movie out cheaply. Even then, profits are rare.

Yes, there are foreign and smart indie films -- movies that, outside of a Michael Moore-size fluke or random ''Napoleon Dynamite" explosion -- play to a tiny fraction of the moviegoing public. And there are savvy art-house theaters like the Coolidge and the Brattle and the Kendall and the West Newton that cater to a self-selective audience of informed culturati. With luck, such theaters will survive as shrines to an art form and to the best way to see it. Just as jazz started mutating in the 1950s from a commercial sound into music for cerebral iconoclasts, so too do the most creative impulses of American film now play to the converted in small, clublike settings.

By contrast, the larger arena of mass-market movies is on the verge of a profound morph, one whose dimensions we can only guess at. For a hint as to how that might unfold, consider the revolution pop music is currently undergoing -- a radical transformation not of content but of distribution and perception. Albums and their associated tactile pleasures are dead. With the rise of the iPod and legal digital downloading, songs are free once more of the album format and even of the individual artist, the way they were back in the Tin Pan Alley era. Your neighbor's teenage kid takes in music on an iPod Shuffle that functions as both a mobile jukebox and eternal soundtrack for the movie that is his life. My daughters consider liner notes, even photos of the band, distinct curiosities. An immediate, disposable, and startlingly pure relationship between listener and song has achieved primacy, one that trumps even the glory days of the 45 single and ''American Top 40."

Movies will evolve differently, to be sure, if only because we have to sit still to watch them. Also, one person can still make a song, whereas many people are traditionally needed to make a film. That is, unless you're Jonathan Caouette, the creator of last year's critically acclaimed ''Tarnation," who created a ''mix film" of his fractious life using home movies and an Apple computer. Again, technology proceeds in the direction of ease and efficiency, and the digital filmmaking explosion means we'll be seeing a lot more Jonathan Caouettes. Whether you think that's a good thing or not is very much beside the point.

How will ease and efficiency affect watching movies? There's one school of thought that foresees the IMAX-ization of every small-town multiplex. Others believe nothing short of lowering ticket prices and scrapping the commercials will bring audiences back. Still others are sure that the movement from mass audiences to small, fragmented group or even solo viewing is unstoppable.

George Lucas wants to see digital projectors in every movie theater in America, but unless he intends to personally bankroll the conversion, it's not going to happen soon. Which may be a shame; the visual warmth that is arguably lost when you go from analog projection to digital is offset by the potential expansion in content choice. Cheap, high-quality 3-D and live concert feeds are suddenly within an exhibitor's reach, and so is the as-yet-unexplored notion of theatrical movies on demand.

Think about it: Since you can theoretically download any film to a digital projector's server, why not program your own night at the movies, invite your friends, and split the proceeds with the theater owner? Pull your favorite classic out of mothballs, screen that underrated horror film, arrange a weeklong festival the way Amazon puts up user guides.

Or go Jonathan Caouette one better: Take that private epic you shot on digital video and edited on your iMac, and zap it straight to theaters. If the shadow plays of Hollywood aren't filling the seats, maybe our own flickering dreams will do the trick. Something had better, and soon, before a tipping point is reached, theatrical exhibition is suddenly no longer economically viable, and movie houses start blinking out. Entertainment formats and mass mediums can and do go extinct; the big screen could yet go the way of vaudeville, the art form it killed off.

But what could possibly replace it? How would movies make that necessary mass-market splash before fragmenting onto DVD, cable, and on-demand? More critically, what would we do as a society without the shared narrative experience? Since before we started taking notes and calling it history, human beings have felt a yearning to sit in a crowd of ecstatic strangers and be awed by the bigness of stories. DVDs and a $4 bag of M&Ms aren't going to make that need disappear, but they may unfortunately spell the end of the best way to indulge it we've yet invented.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com