I think you’d have to be comfortable seeing big budget mediocre films if that’s one of your hobbies. There's a ton of bad movies out at any one time. Or rather a ton of mediocre (at best) ones.
When a new movie comes out, I say either “that looks like it would be a good movie to watch in theatre”, or (far more often) “I think I’ll wait for that to come out on iTunes/Netflix/etc.” When I’m making that decision, the bar is high. But that’s because watching-at-home really is good enough for the vast majority of movies—it doesn’t remove anything from the experience.
I'd like to see evidence of assertions to the contrary, because to me they don't jibe with reality.
For me, seeing a movie in a theatre vs. watching at home is a bit like going to a restaurant vs. eating at home. I used to “go to restaurants” to try specific things I’d heard about, when I was single. Now, though, I mostly only go to a restaurant to go to a restaurant, because that’s a nice thing I can do with my wife. With restaurants, this is the difference between choosing by word-of-mouth (“they have great X!”) vs. choosing by reviews (“this restaurant seems like they’d have something we’d enjoy, let’s go and find out.”) Movie theatres don’t really have the same element of diversity (unless you’re going to independent cinemas), so it’s more just a choice of whether to go to “the movies” at all.
On the other hand, everything I said about restaurants applies exactly to the other kind of theatre. There’s a Shakespeare troupe here (Vancouver) that, each year, puts on three of the bard’s plays (several showings apiece.) You can certainly want to “see The Tempest”, and therefore go watch them perform it; but what I hear much more often is people wanting to “go to Bard on the Beach” (the troupe), and so then they look at what they’re putting on this year to see if it’s anything they could stand to watch. In this context, the theatre troupe is exactly like a restaurant: they want to go to it, as long as it has something they’d be okay trying.
Interested in others thoughts. I think the sibling commenter may have got it right with the fact people make a conscious decision to go see a movie beforehand as an outing, rather than turn up at the cinema and see what's on.