There’s one curious statistic in Sharon Waxman’s N.Y. Times story about a new online study finding that Hollywood is “being jilted” by young males who are being lured away by video games and other digital activities. The readings said that guys-under-25 saw “24 percent fewer movies this summer than they did in the summer of 2003, when the same study was conducted. The drop in moviegoing was much smaller for women and for other age groups.” The study contacted 2000 people and used “a random, nationally representative sample of moviegoers who were queried online in August.” The odd bit comes at the end of a graph that says the study, conducted by a Los Angeles-based online reserach group called OTX, “echoed a finding about television viewing that was much disputed two years ago, when Nielsen Media Research charted a sharp decline in prime-time ratings among men ages 18 to 34. That finding, which delineated the growing fragmentation of the viewing audience…attributed to a rise in alternate activities, like video games.” And yet at the end of this graph, Waxman reports that “a year later, the viewership returned.” And what does that mean? (I’m lost.) Otherwise, the OTX study obviously reenforces last spring-and-summer’s concerns about a dwindling movie audience. It also seems to dispute the reported “new thinking” among studio execs, as reported by L.A. Times‘ Claudia Eller and John Horn not too long ago, that the fault, dear Brutus, lies in our crappy movies and not in the public’s changing entertainment habits.