Should people be able to use their phones after the lights go down in movie theaters?

Hollywood has pondered that question for years as a way to make moviegoing more appealing to teenagers and young adults. Because cinephiles have always responded with venom, to put it mildly, the answer has always been an emphatic “no.”

But desperate times call for desperate measures.

Despite recent successes like “A Minecraft Movie” and “Sinners,” the North American box office is down 33 percent from 2019 — just before the pandemic sped up a consumer shift to streaming — according to Comscore, which compiles box office data.

So on Wednesday, Blumhouse, the horror studio affiliated with Universal Pictures, teamed with Meta to experiment with a technology called Movie Mate. It’s a chatbot that encourages people to tap, tap, tap on hand-held small screens as they watch films on a big one. Users gain access to exclusive trivia and

Keep reading this article on The New York Times Media & Advertising.