When I heard that Sony had bought the Alamo Drafthouse theater chain, I first wondered why the Federal Trade Commission didn’t try to block it. Lina Khan, the FTC chair, is an aggressive foe of both horizontal mergers (competitors buying each other) and vertical mergers (companies buying their suppliers or distributors). And when it comes to vertical mergers, studio ownership of movie theaters has a special place in the history of antitrust enforcement.

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.

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.

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.

Megan McArdle is a columnist for The Washington Post.