Millennials still go to the movies, they’re just too cool to talk about it

However, Deadline says the problem isn’t that millennials are too interested in their phones to go to the movies, the problem is that they’re too interested in their phones to tell people that they’re going to the movies. According to the National Association Of Theater Owners (or NATO, as long as you explain the acronym first), a lot of statistics like the ones cited in the Atlantic story come from surveys that are “conducted via landline phones,” which is probably the least effective way to reach millennials—or anyone, really. Seriously, people send handwritten letters more often than they answer a landline phone these days. Anyway, not only does NATO disagree that young people are avoiding movies, it says that the millennial audience has actually been “growing by double digits for the last five years” and that the movies they go to see “are the premium, higher ticket price movies.”

So, as with most things these days, maybe the problem isn’t really millennials. Maybe it’s another loosely defined group of people that are easy to blame for everything, like hipsters. How many movies do hipsters see in the theaters? Probably none, because they’re too busy talking on landline phones.