Exactly. It isn't that complex for them to survive, but the days of cities having theaters all over the place are over. I grew up in a place that had ~100k people. A lot, but outside of that area there was pretty much nothing. We had something like 4 movie theaters that all showed new releases. That's usually all they showed. We did have a dollar theater (which was awesome) and that showed movies a bit later than the "bigger" theaters in town. You could get away with that stuff back then because movies didn't hit at home release for a very long time. Now I think it's only 3 months out of the theater and even then some go directly to streaming. Theaters can't compete with that.
What they can do is show older movies like you said. One of the coolest things I got to do in college was go see Raiders of the Lost Ark in the theater. One of my all time favorite movies, but theaters everywhere around me only showed new releases so I would have never gotten the chance had we not gone to this old school theater that only had one screen and showed one movie a night. It was awesome.
Theaters can have events and rent out rooms too. A lot do that now, but more could. PS5 on an Imax screen/sound system? Yes please. Kids would love that.
While I do agree that theaters showing new releases or even older movies with dinner or just quality food/snacks is awesome, but most don't have the capacity to do that and to build that into an existing theater would be expensive. They should do it, but a lot of theaters won't and still need to close.
One of the biggest mistakes companies made was putting too many locations of whatever business type too close together. Now there are so many that nobody cares anymore and just gets everything online. Saturation is bad. People want something new that they can't get just anywhere. The experience has to be special or nobody will go. It's not complicated.
