'Why Movie Fans are Staying Home'

The San Jose Mercury News publishes a front page piece very similar to the New York Times piece a few weeks back, with a very similar headline, too. (The Times' headline was "With Popcorn, DVD's and TiVo, Moviegoers Are Staying Home.")

The piece, by Bruce Newman, has a great opener:

What Joey Puntanilla remembers best about seeing ``Star Wars'' with his 6-year-old son this month is the way the sound thundered every time something blew up on screen. ``The room was shaking during all the battle scenes,'' he recalls. ``My son was loving it.''

Unfortunately for the multiplexes -- where Puntanilla, his son and his fiancee used to go to the movies almost every weekend -- the family was at home in South San Jose, watching a DVD of the original ``Star Wars'' on their new $13,000 home theater system just purchased at Best Buy.

The next paragraph references an Associated Press-AOL poll, released this month, which found that 73 percent of adults prefer to watch movies at home. Only 22 percent said they'd rather be in a theater.

Full survey results are here.