Movie Theatres like Premium Cable?

Eight films on 500 plus screens are being released this weekend. It is a record that no theatre owner will be busting out the champagne for. What's that sound? Is it the painful cries of the slowly dying movie theatre experience? What huge summer blockbuster smash that lowered the bar for what passes as mainstream entertainment was released this past Tuesday? If you guessed Transformers you are correct. But wait, wasn't that released in July? Wasn't that.... 3 MONTHS AGO? I thought only major box office flops were rushed to DVD right? Wrong. And with 8 films coming out this weekend it seems studios are expressing their disinterest in whether their film performs well or not. They certainly aren't taking the audience into consideration because I can bet that half these titles will be out of your local AMC before the middle of November hits. Is the theatrical release becoming as irrelevant as the Grammys? Is it now just pure decorum? The hours'dourves to the main course of revenue from DVD sales/rentals, cable rights, and merchandise? I can sadly count MANY foreign and independent releases that DID NOT MAKE IT to LA or were screened for a week at best and then left that were available simultaneously on IN DEMAND. This means my parents who live in a small backwoods suburban town could watch Dans Paris and Private Property before I could as they live in a giant air conditioned house with 300 cable channels. Its these LITTLE things, these small priviledges of city life that you cling onto and fool yourself into thinking make you superior and validate your insanly high apartment living, traffic, and pollution. This is a reason I have also held out on Netflix for so long. I still rent from my local video store, which has an amazing selection I might add, solely to preserve a sense of community, geography and space. But this is disheartening. I might as well live in the middle of FUCKING Utah. I'm sure there'll be a Starbucks there.