tl;dr: Marketers control Hollywood production and are risk-averse gatekeepers. A bubble in independent/boutique production disrupted that side-channel.
It's not a complete picture; why doesn't the independent/boutique side fire back up? I think a better explanation is technology/distribution, i.e. HDTV + cable/internet. TV's mentioned in the article, but only as kind of a silver-lining; really it seems more like a classic disruptive technology. Shows like Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire, Breaking Bad are highly visual and would until recently have been better as movies; now plenty of people have nice TVs, and they work fine there.
So the movie theater's niche is now reduced to material which needs to be huge in size, enormously loud, 3D, or seen primarily by people who refuse to or can't buy HDTVs. Everything else seems transitional.
It's not a complete picture; why doesn't the independent/boutique side fire back up? I think a better explanation is technology/distribution, i.e. HDTV + cable/internet. TV's mentioned in the article, but only as kind of a silver-lining; really it seems more like a classic disruptive technology. Shows like Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire, Breaking Bad are highly visual and would until recently have been better as movies; now plenty of people have nice TVs, and they work fine there.
So the movie theater's niche is now reduced to material which needs to be huge in size, enormously loud, 3D, or seen primarily by people who refuse to or can't buy HDTVs. Everything else seems transitional.