Will Netflix Kill Movie Theaters?

Netflix has had the television industry on edge for the past few years. Is Hollywood starting to feel it, too?

Brandi and I have discussed on-air—at length—our love of Netflix. In a lot of ways, it’s completely changed my television-viewing habits; where I would normally get the rare opportunity to sit-down and channel surf, I now… Netflix surf? Flix wave? I don’t know what the term is, but I’m going to coin it and make a billion dollars.

So, watching streaming movies has changed my TV viewing, but it’s also changed my movie watching. Instead of going to the movies to see something I’m kind of “meh” about, I’ll wait until it’s on Netflix.

Turns out, I’m not the only one:

Movie attendance dropped by a surprisingly sharp 5.1% in 2014 according to new data. This is unlikely to be just a normal part of industry ebb and flow since admittances plunged to lowest level since 1995, even though the U.S. population has grown robustly in the past two decades.

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The most worrisome data nugget concerns Americans aged 14-24 — people in this age bracket delivered a stunning 15% decline in movie-going. This comes right after a reported 17% decline in the previous year.

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Probably the worst threat to traditional movie business is the streaming cornucopia offered by Netflix. It’s bad enough that Netflix is offering a relatively broad range of TV series and movies produced by a variety of studios. But now, the company is ramping up its own content production — and much of it is aimed directly at young people between the ages of 12 and 24.

That being said, I’m more likely to watch movies I never would have otherwise; stuff I would have passed on at the movies, I’ll now be more apt to watch on Netflix. So I’m going to the movies less… but seeing more movies. Am I alone?