For all you folks saying you'd be fine if most movie theaters vanished for good (they won't, but just for argument's sake) bc you'd just watch movies from your couch. Ok. Again, that probably won't happen. But let's say it does. Here's what very well happens after that. (1/)

(Thread and it's long, like the lines at a movie theater, so mute as needed)

First, budgets shrink for every studio film, the biggest most drastically. Streaming can't support more than a few $100m pics, let alone $200m pics, for very long. (Heck they can't support them now, which is why most streaming ventures aren't profitable, but that's another yarn)

The tentpoles – the Marvel & Potter & Bond movies, the movies we most like to see, as evidenced by the gajillion tickets they sell – are drastically cut. They don't get made, or they get made as star-and effects-lite TV movies. No theaters, no money to make them. Accounting 101.

Now, if millions of Americans are willing to pay 30 bucks a pop to watch them at home, maybe -- maybe -- you can finance a few of them. Let me know when you find those millions of Americans. I think they're currently busy not renting Mulan.

So now most of these movies we know and love aren't get made by Hollywood studios. Like maybe a few are. Maybe it's one out of every four currently made. Maybe one of five. What now?

Well, here's the thing. We still hunger for these movies. We don't stop loving Harry Potter or 007 or Captain Marvel because, like, AMC can't service its debt. So what happens?

Well, the good news is there is a set of companies that can afford to make these movies. They have loads and loads of theaters that aren't going anywhere. And rows and rows of people to fill them. And bags and bags of cash that are only getting bigger.

Most important, they have a very strong desire to produce these movies and sell them to us, because, well, they already produce so many other things and sell them to us.

Yes, I'm talking about China, which is deadset -- Dead. Set. -- on creating big tentpoles for the global market. And if you think that's a pipe dream and their filmmaking is too jingoistic or too amateurish or too out of sync with Western tastes, you haven't been paying attention

Just look at The Wandering Earth. China has the wherewithal to make tentpole entertainment that doesn't look that different from the American stuff. And these movies are only going to get bigger and splashier. At the exact moment Hollywood studios are retrenching.

Maybe they’re in English so U.S. will see them or maybe they’re Chinese so rest of world will see them (bc once you’re reading subtitles does it matter what language?) Probably a mix. Either way, they’ll be global.

You see where it's going. Because so it’s gone with many other formerly purely American industries.

Seems fantastical, right? But here's the thing: Hollywood doesn't have to dominate. It's not enshrined in law anywhere. Movies are a historically recent invention. A long future awaits. It may not be a strictly American one.

And maybe that's OK. We've had a good run w/massive effects-driven franchises. 40+ years, the last 15 of which we basically treated them like Da Vinci paintings. Maybe time to give another a turn. We'll create other gripping entertainment. Streaming has proved we can.

Now, having outlined all this, I don't think it happens. I think studios are too savvy (and cash-conscious) to start pulling all their movies out of theaters. I think WB's move is an anomaly, particular to that company. I think other studios step up or step in.

Studios buy out theaters, which really gives them incentive to keep with the model. The number may consolidate; the experience will evolve. But theaters are a bound-up part of our business and cultural landscape.

And if it turns out they're not? The Hollywood tentpole as we know it goes away and we see what jumps in to take its place.

Thanks for following this long and unexpectedly trans-Pacific thought experiment.