With an incredibly deep amount of respect, David, your references to "wokeness" sound similar to FL's governor, who's made a habit of using a term like "woke", which was once a positive thing that implied people were standing up and fighting against injustices or wrongs, and they've instead twisted the term to imply a negative. Some are now using it to condemn any forward thinking action on social issues and to imply it's "radicalism". I personally have respect for you and think you're above that. Regarding LGBT movie characters, the same was said about the TV sitcom Will & Grace more than 20 years ago as they dared show a few gay guys functioning quite normally in everyday society - because how dare they? In the end, that show ran for something like 8 seasons, then was revived in 2017 and ran for 3 more, so someone was watching and appreciating it..But I digress.
For whatever reasons, "woke" has taken on a distinct negative quality when seemingly contrived situations are inserted or created just to show diverse racial, sexual and social groups delightfully intermingling in scenarios where they seem totally un-natural.
A friend who is Hispanic and in the business told me to roll the final credits to Top Gun: Maverick and, excluding the crew in India, count the Hispanics on the cast and crew. Remembering that Los Angles and its metro are approaching 50% Hispanic in ages under 60, the percentage of obviously Hispanic surnames is less than 4%. Adding in perhaps 1% more for Hispanics who do not have Spanish / Iberian surnames like Hadad or Rosenfeld or Fujimori, that is still a percentage that is many, many times under that of the metro area itself. Oh, and my friend said, "you will note that the Hispanics are mostly listed under "catering" and "grounds keeping" categories.
Regarding the issue with low theater attendance, I've personally been to a few movies since covid. If it's an anticipated release, the theaters are full in the days after it's first released. I've also been to a few live theater performance in houses that seat more than 1,000 and they've been full so in my neck of the woods and in the larger cities I've traveled to at least, Covid doesn't seem to play a major part.
I wonder if this is regional. The theater management friend I chatted with is involved only in the Southwest. However, he believes the most dramatic factor is cost, not COVID.
IMO the 3 big points affecting people going to movies are: 1) Financial - 2) Larger and better TVs and sound systems for homes, and nearly unlimited content on streaming platforms 3) Movies, in general, just aren't that great and few are worth spending the $$ to see them in theaters IMO.
I condensed your 3 points to the headline. And I agree with all of them.
In lower income families, budgets were adjusted to make a larger TV possible during the pandemic, particularly when coupled with historically low interest rates even for high-risk credit cards. Those families will think twice or three times before going to the movies where a family of 5 can easily spend $100 on tickets and a snack.
Among Spanish dominant Hispanic households, moving to a big screen TV has the advantage of making lots of Spanish language content available either with movies and shows from Spain and Latin America , American content subtitled in Spanish or English language content dubbed in Spanish. Since that group is now over 10% of U.S. population, that is a significant audience that is being lost to theaters.
And I agree on both the cost of movie theater attendance and the quality of new releases. We used to have a membership plan that made going to just two or three movies a month a big saving, and we generally saw around 6 theatricals a month. We did not renew the membership plan, and have no desire to return to a theater again. In chatting with neighbors... all of whom are either fully or partially retired, we found them to have similar changes in their theatrical attendance. Obviously, my "sample size" is small, but the comments from friends in the business indicated a real problem.
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