Would you pay $50 to see a big mainstream movie at home, a month after it hits theaters?

What about two weeks?

What about paying $30?

Let’s call this the theoretical $30 question. Earlier this week, Variety’s Brent Lang reported on the majority of the major film studios currently negotiating their future releasing strategy, specifically how quickly (and cheaply) to offer their titles for on-demand streaming and DVD viewing.

The studios have differing preferences regarding how quickly to make their movies available on all platforms. According to Variety, 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros. are weighing whether to make their films available on all platforms four to six weeks after their theatrical openings, at $30 a pop. Universal, meanwhile, prefers to see a home entertainment debut more quickly, in the three-week range, at a higher price.

Disney likes things just the way they are. With the walloping, pre-branded success of “Beauty and the Beast,” already flying toward the $500 million worldwide box-office mark after last week’s U.S. launch, Disney is not interested in shortening the current, approximate 90-day window and cannibalizing its theatrical revenue. It’s the custodian of the Marvel movies and the “Star Wars” movies, and those are movies audiences will actually get off social media long enough to see on a big screen, surrounded by strangers committing to a communal act of fandom.

I understand the economic argument. If a group, familial or otherwise, can save money and avoid a pricey concession stand (the bread and fake butter of the theatrical exhibition game), it’s a compelling scenario. You wait two, three or four weeks, instead of 12 or 13 weeks, to see a movie you want to see; you see it for $30 or so at home on your whatever-inch TV screen, surrounded by loved ones or even just people you tolerate; you make the snacks yourself. You save many dozens of dollars overall.

But as a private citizen, a moviegoer and a critic, I duck the economic argument almost every time when it comes to the medium I love.

I grew up with movies as a gang experience of a certain size, and countless X-factors (cleanliness, projection quality, running commentaries) out of my control. All those factors are still with us at the multiplex, compounded by texting.

It’s a drag sometimes. But that’s how I like it. I don’t even like the phrase “on demand.” It sounds pushy and needy to me.

Here’s what we don’t know yet, and we won’t know, until it happens. We don’t know yet how a smaller excellent movie, such as “Moonlight” or “Manchester by the Sea,” will perform theatrically if “Moonlight” or “Manchester by the Sea” were available for home viewing a few weeks after (or simultaneous with) its highly profitable theatrical run.

We don’t know if Disney would be looking at its first probable billion-dollar hit of 2017 if “Beauty and the Beast” was a couple of weeks away from a $30, $40 or even $50 home entertainment option.

Jordan Peele’s low-budget killer “Get Out” has grossed $137 million domestically to date, on a budget of $4.5 million. If the movie had been made available day-and-date (simultaneously, that is) on home platforms, would that have stoked interest and profits, or lessened them?

Rebecca Hall, operations manager at the Gene Siskel Film Center, is a co-founder of the proudly analog, defiantly purist Chicago Cinema Society. She’s a generation younger than me, and not what you’d call a frequent patron of the average multiplex.

“I feel sorry these days for the mainstream theaters,” she says. “People aren’t all that attached to going to them.” However, Hall suspects a shorter gap between theatrical and home-viewing film availability “won’t devalue the theatrical experience. It’s apples and oranges, but at the Film Society, a lot of the old films we show are available online already. But we’re doing well. And it’s fun to go to the right movie theater. Especially for independent exhibitors, the Film Center, the Music Box, the Film Society, it’s about a community, running into people you know, and meeting people you don’t.”