It’s lights out for the movies

FOR SALE: spacious, high-ceilinged beauty, 2 ba, upgraded sound system, ample off-street parking. Sacrifice.”

The only real estate going begging in this bubbling market is the space your heinie occupies -- or doesn’t -- at the cineplex.

Movie attendance is eroding like George W. Bush’s approval ratings. Summer -- the season when Hollywood is supposed to make its nut -- has laid an egg: Attendance is 10% below last summer, which wasn’t boffo itself. The box office totals stay afloat only because ticket prices rise even as the number of buyers sinks. People who used to skip the book and wait for the movie are now skipping the movie and waiting for the DVD.

The commentarians have been autopsying the numbers, reading in the entrails the end of a shared national experience. In 1948, as Edward Jay Epstein points out in his book “The Big Picture,” 65% of Americans went to the movies at least once a week. Last year, it was 10%. Moviegoing has to compete in a fractured entertainment market of video games, Internet amusements, cable TV and DVDs.

What’s lost? Not money. Studios make their really big dough on DVDs, on TV rights and on movie-themed games and toys. If there were money in “Sideways” action figures, Miles-and-Maya corkscrews and “Oh No, Not Merlot” T-shirts, the studios would be making more “Sidewayses.”

Audiences still march to the cinemas for uniquely big-screen sensations such as the “Star Wars” sextet and wondrous one-offs such as “March of the Penguins.” Ideally, watching a film in a theater is like riding a roller coaster: The experience is enhanced when it’s shared. I saw “Bowling for Columbine” in Honolulu, where the audience -- laughing, cheering, gasping, booing -- made it a different movie from the one I watched again, alone, at home on DVD.

Honolulu was the ideal. The reality is more like being stuck on a crowded cross-country Greyhound bus.

Exhibits A to D:

* Movies are now made and marketed for children or hyperactive teens and 20-year-olds whose libidos are more substantial than their attention spans.

* They’re unimaginative, derivative and thin. Are they ladling out Movie Helper in the studio commissaries? “The Dukes of Hazzard” was barely good enough for TV in the early 1980s; how has it possibly improved enough to be a feature film now?

* Cineastes who think “talkies” mean the audience, not the film. People who’ve grown up watching movies on TV at home act like they’re at home when they go to the movies. Theaters don’t need ushers -- they need bouncers. (The movies’ patron saint ought to be David Gordon, a San Gabriel man who, 50 years ago, drew a gun on a couple of noisy popcorn-eaters interrupting his enjoyment of a Rosalind Russell-Glenn Ford double feature. The jury ended up hung.)

* The ads. I can watch them at home, free, without having to wait in line for the bathroom. (The Times once ran ads in movie theaters starring its own reporters, including me. I cringed when people booed and threw popcorn at the screen -- the waste of good popcorn weighed on my conscience for years.)

Coming soon, the movie paradigm will shift once and for all. The studios will surrender. The last cobwebbed theater will be converted to a swap meet or a church. New releases will be sold by pay-per-view and beamed to our individual plasma screens. And in acknowledgment of our solitary viewing habits, the studios will add laugh tracks to movies, just like the ones in TV sitcoms -- so all of us watching at home alone will know exactly when we’re supposed to be enjoying ourselves.