The last time I went to a theatre was for one of the Harry Potter series from several years ago. It was well-attended but as others have said, it is not worth the money anymore.
But that is not the subject here - the theatres may be dying or they may be flush with cash, the fact that relatives of shooting victims decided to sue a venue for something that was not the fault of the venue is ridiculous. If the building had caved in (in which case the owner of the building should be co-defendant) they would have had a case. The idea here is to sue some entity they think has money regardless of whether there is a cause-and-effect relationship between the criminal and the business. They could sue the estate of the shooter, but a small amount of money spread out over the large number of plaintiffs was not going to be a sufficient payday. So they sued the venue where the shooting occurred because they thought they could get more money that way, using the excuse that there should have been more security. This is one reason I would never set up a business in the US: the LLL (legal liability lottery).
A couple of examples: a burglar who tried to break into a factory in the US fell through a skylight (like Buffy in "The Freshman"). He sued the company for $30,000 and won. A woman who claimed to be a psychic was injured in a car accident and was taken to emergency where a CAT scan was done. She claimed the CAT scan eliminated her psychic powers and sued the hospital and won $1.2 million.
Until recently, the law in Canada was that in order to file a suit, you had to pay the court costs up front and the lawyers had to be paid up front, they could not be paid on contingency (a percentage of the winnings). Now we have accident lawyers advertising that you don't pay a cent unless they win, so it seems we are moving in the American direction but we do not have the litigious culture of the US yet.
