For some historical referrence, there was a court decision in 1948 stopping the movie studios from owning the theater chains too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic....
I worked in a movie theater in the early 2000s and the studios/distributors had theaters by the throat anyway. Disney for example could demand any terms they wanted for allowing for example star wars and theaters bid against each other regionally for an artificially limited number of 'prints' (today they're hard drives) and could insist on 100% of the take, a % of concession sales, pretty brutal terms. I don't know what the industry is like in the last 15 years.
Disney has owned the El Capitan in hollywood for years, though. Not sure how that was allowed as an exception if the rule was only recinded in 2020. Maybe just chains.
