It's more fun to watch a movie in a cinema than at home

Yup, it isn't the same. I can not invite people who will talk and I can turn the lights fully off. Plus, if something is so funny that people laugh through the next line, we can go back to hear it. We can watch it by whatever standards the people watching agree to.

I accept all that you say, Rachel, but on balance I stand by the claim.

That said, I don't go to the cinema nearly as much now as I did, say, five years ago — and certainly nowhere near as often as I did fifteen years ago. I still enormously enjoy the shared experience in a well-filled cinema, but it's a bit of a bummer when the place is almost empty, when the people who are there are munching their nachos and crinkling their sweet papers, when so many cinema complexes around the city offer the same rota of movies and effectively make my choice less than it used to be, when … but I'd better stop before I disagree with my own claim.

In all honesty, it depends on the cinema experience. There are always the teenagers that will babble loudly and declaim the movie for no apparent reason; the college students that will make amusing cracks about the movie (guilty as charged), and the children that will invariably stare blankly at adult humor.

The main advantage of the theaters, really, is just a bigger screen.