An article over at Slate uses the recent adjustment of Snowpiercer’s nationwide distribution — initially in a few theaters, then widely expanded as a cable Video On Demand selection — as a springboard to discuss the fast-shifting tide away from brick-and-mortar movie theaters. It’s a good read on a subject that has been out there for a while already (I’ve written about it myself in past columns), but that seems to be evolving quickly.

Snowpiercer is a pretty good example of why this issue is important to moviegoers. It was made for a fairly large budget (nearly $40 million, according to Wikipedia), almost all of which can be seen onscreen in the form of a spectacular grimy-futuristic look — but its genre limitations will never endear it to a wide enough audience on the scale of, say, the latest Transformers movie. That puts the movie in a tough spot: It’s too expensive to easily recoup its money through a small-scale arthouse release schedule, but too niche a product to sustain a proper wide release.

Enter VOD, which has lost a lot of its negative stigma in the past couple of years. Every month cable-TV subscribers can browse a library of hundreds of films — some older titles, and plenty that were recently seen in theaters and are now jockeying for position on DVD/Blu-ray. But there’s also a regular and constantly updated selection of thought-provoking indie and arthouse films that haven’t made it to theaters yet; and when they are released theatrically, the odds of them making it to Rochester’s Little Theatre, let alone Movietime in Canandaigua, are slim to none.

Coupled with the rise in home-theater technology, this means that filmgoers no longer have to feel like they’re “settling” when they stay home to watch a movie. Epics still belong on the big screens, but for smaller, intimate works many film fanatics can often get much of what they want without leaving the house.

This presents a major challenge for theaters, and an existential question for cinephiles: What does it mean to watch a movie? We’ll have to get to that question another day.