Regardless how movie attendance numbers get crunched and trends get tracked, these days are not the best of times for movie theaters. In fact, it’s outright dismal. There is a documented North American movie theater attendance slump. Aside from some late fall blips like last month’s Hunger Games installment and this month’s Meryl Streep and Johnny Depp musical Into the Woods, the latest chapter of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies and an HD Moses and Ramses in Exodus: Gods and Kings, there's not much coming to boost 2015 attendance.

Depending on the tracking source, impartial guesstimates say movie attendance is down by some 25 percent. Even the hardcore movie biz numbers show that (compared to 2013) this year’s $7.2 billion North American box office take is down by a tell-tale 6 percent.

Suncoast theater managers from Sarasota’s Regal Hollywood Stadium 20 and the AMC Westfield Mall to the older and smaller Frank Theatres Galleria Stadium in Venice are shaking their heads, logging in to their box office and concession spreadsheet lists and checking them twice. Venice’s Frank Theatres may be an amusing oddity. Especially on cheap-night Tuesdays, when swarms of smiling seniors, fresh from deals on early bird menu specials, line-up, delight and illogically clutch their bargain $5 movie tickets, while springing for $8 popcorn.

Industry insiders, deep-pocket producers all the way down to local theater managers are a concerned chorus, groping and scrambling for a grab bag of plausible reasons and lame excuses to lay the blame.

Aside from the obvious—lousy choices, a drought of ho-hum movies and no blockbusters like Frozen, Gravity, Despicable Me and the Twilight series—other festering reasons for the hefty slump in attendance span from the serious to the sublime.

The high cost of tickets is definitely a factor. The give-or-take $11 general admission (more for IMAX and 3D screenings) usually gets blamed on Hollywood's eight- and nine-digit production tab (about 70 percent of a ticket price goes back to the studios and distributors) and various non-show biz, routine local theater expenses like per-showing fees, payroll, rent, utilities and maintenance.

More and more stats indicate that movie attendance is growingly the casualty of the juggernaut that is technology. Netflix, streaming, uploading, DVD sales and rentals are the asphyxiating competition, the refreshing and irresistible convenience of cost-efficient and comfortable movie- viewing—with lots of choices on your own time and on your own terms. Technology is not only suffocating attendance but it could soon relegate local movie theaters to places of fringe entertainment, like live theaters where loyal-but-graying audiences applaud with standing ovations for Neil Simon, Tennessee Williams and Noel Coward.

TV screens are bigger and inexpensive. And the personalized convenience of anytime clicking Start-Stop-Resume on-demand or online movies or archived TV series are also potent competition for movie theater attendance.

According to cyber stats, Netflix accounts for 30 percent of all evening Internet activity, luring away millions of lost moviegoers. Other attendance-slump reasons vary from unpredictable and fickle moviegoer whims to quirky factors like the weather, long weekends and audience moods.

A subtle but huge turn-off is the gouging cost of treats. Popcorn. $5 bottled water. Oversized soda. Junior Mints. Gummy Bears. Even for non-Scrooges, the tab for movie theater refreshments range from the ridiculous to the obscene. Popcorn, the sacred movie theater treat, is a prime example of the gouging. The kernels popped for a large popcorn cost about eight cents. The large paper bags (if not sponsored by a new release movie like Frozen or Iron Man) costs the local theater about 25 cents. A plastic tub can cost 90 cents. Ka-ching. The $8 cost of a large popcorn is a 700 percent mark-up.

It’s a mystery! Despite drooping attendance and smaller crowds, the frustrating ritual of trolling, looping around and jockeying for a parking space, then getting winded, walking what feels like a couple of blocks is still a must. And although obnoxious and inconsiderate coughers, candy unwrappers and yakkers have always been pains in the seats, technology has made it even worse and created a new breed of obnoxious and inconsiderate smartphone abusers, who live in a distracting world of their own. Whatever the reasons, it sure takes the fun out of “ it’s showtime.”