I'm not sure that film is a good indicator of anything, beyond its own inability to attract an audience. It cost less than a million to make and has only managed around 3 million nationwide since it opened on June 10 (per IMDB). Currently, it's playing at only one theatre in the whole Seattle area.
As for the economic argument, I don't think people do anything as regularly as they used to, but it's not necessarily because of price. If you want to take it back that far, you could consider that the movie theatre was the public's "evening news", and admission was somewhere around a nickel or so. Television eventually screwed that up for the cinema and it had to adapt... which it did.
When I grew up, we had one phone in the basement and it was on a 259-party line. We couldn't stand the thing and it got used, maybe, twice a week. Now, we can't stay off the phones and our kids use them to communicate in a manner that's SLOWER than actually talking.
We have a million more options to select from when deciding what to do with our elective time... starting with the tube (now flatscreen) in our living room... and probably in our kids' rooms, too.
In my humble opinion, the public hasn't considered theatre-going a regular habit for a long time, select few examples notwithstanding. Rather, we're more comparable to a night at a local play, a concert, maybe a major-league sporting event. Compared to those choices, we're still a pretty good deal.
Yes, the studios could come up with better stories, but then we'd blame our perceived malaise on something else.
Life is more expensive. You simply can not run a theatre and make reasonable payments to yourself by running one the way it was done in your parents' time.
A family will spend only so much of their disposable income on entertainment. Whether they spend it in one shot or split it up and go to a discounted house twice, it'll probably be about the same. However, in the second example, you will have carried the overhead of serving them twice for roughly the same money.
Adapt, promote, position, find a way to provide as exceptional an experience as you can with the same basic product every other theatre in town has.
Oh... and work the social media options as hard as you can. A sure way not to reach the majority of your potential customers is to advertise only in the local paper, like we all did forever. Unless your trade is mostly seniors, who don't tend to buy a lot at the popcorn counter, many of us could probably get by without the paper altogether.... but that's yet another tether that's painful to break.
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