Would you pay $100 to watch 'Avengers' at home?

"Why are there captions on the screen? And why are most of those captions projected on the wall instead of the screen? Why are so many people standing in the aisle instead of finding a seat? Why is the screen so dark? Wait, wait, wait - why is the screen frozen?!?"

These are the questions that ran through my head last weekend when my fiancee and I attempted to see "Avengers: Age of Ultron" at a suburban movie theater. Unbeknown to us, we bought tickets for an open-captioned screening for the deaf and hard of hearing, which would have been fine - if it had been projected correctly. We bailed when the screen froze, and the theater manager kindly gave us four readmission passes even though we only asked for two.

In perfect conditions, a movie theater is still the best place to see a movie. But how many times do we actually get those perfect conditions? Frequent moviegoers know the distractions and annoyances well: Texting and talking patrons. Images that are out-of-focus and underlit. 3-D glasses that make the underlit picture even darker. Sound that's too soft or too loud. (Well, to be honest, it can never be too loud for me.)

At lunch Saturday, I turned to my fiancee and said, "I would gladly pay $100 to watch this movie from our couch tonight." Later that night, some friends and I did pay $100 to watch Floyd Mayweather fight Manny Pacquiao in the boxing ring, but I bet we would have had more fun watching Tony Stark and his pals fight evil robots.

Making new films available from video-on-demand services during their theatrical release is not a new idea; I watched last year's sci-fi indie hit "Snowpiercer" on Xfinity the same night it premiered in area theaters, and there are many similarly budgeted and marketed films available right now from your cable/VOD provider that also are playing in art house theaters.

But will studios ever take the leap of offering their premium products at home and at the theater on the same day? Universal Pictures wanted to try it - sort of - in 2011, and planned to offer digital rentals of the Ben Stiller/Eddie Murphy comedy "Tower Heist" to Comcast subscribers in Atlanta and Portland just three weeks after it opened in theaters. The $60 price tag seemed hefty for a three-week-old movie, and theater owners hated the idea of losing blockbuster business to a cable box, so Universal ultimately scrapped the idea. (We'll eliminate last year's controversial "The Interview" from this discussion given the strange circumstances surrounding its release.)

"Tower Heist" was not a guaranteed hit, and the returns prove it - the $75 million film grossed just $78 million in North America and $153 million total. We can imagine how theater owners would react if Disney wanted to release "Age of Ultron," a surefire billion-dollar grosser, in similar fashion.

So I don't expect to ever be afforded the chance to pay $100 to watch the latest Marvel movie from my couch on opening day, and that's ultimately a good thing - movies are meant to be seen in movie theaters, and patrons and exhibitors have to work together to make sure it stays that way.

Of course, there are platforms and release strategies to come that even the most savvy of us cannot predict or dream up. For all we know, Netflix and Disney will be the only entertainment companies on Earth in a couple of decades and "Iron Man 12" will be projected directly into our brains.

Hey, it could happen. I mean, we all drive time-traveling, flying DeLoreans, take our hoverboards to the park and use the hydrator to cook pizza, right?

• Sean Stangland is a Daily Herald copy editor. You can follow him on Twitter at @SeanStanglandDH.