Yeah, I don't see the appeal.
Maybe I'm spoiled. Most of the theaters here in Lincoln, NE have good sound and picture, with several Atmos theaters with enormous screens, way bigger than what is pictured above. Some have powered reclining loungers.
That said, the bass in my humble home theater is far better in both quality and quantity. Why? Because my room is 1400 sq ft, not 14,000.
Most commercial cinemas have a lot of bass if they are of the newest types from IMAX and Dolby, but even the best of them have little output below 25hz. I've heard some pretty bombastic bass in commercial cinemas, but certainly, it sounds different. That standard approach to bass in commercial cinema's today has evolved quite a bit and is now using multiple subwoofers around the room. Often the surrounds have subs below them at periodic locations as well as an array of subs up front. It's not uncommon to have 10-20 18" sub drivers in a single space. They are more than capable or producing in excess of 115dB's output between 30hz and 80hz, many can do that down to 25hz or even lower. For example, some cinema's have Danley subs, those can certainly do even more below 30hz. They may also use subs based on the newest high excursion drivers from JBL, B&C, or BMS. These often have 15-20mm of xmax and a high 90's sensitivity. This became a huge debate at a local event recently, people arguing that cinemas should switch to high xmax car or home sub drivers such as those from SI. I was fairly sure the low sensitivity would cause those drivers to way under-perform in a large room. It turned out that I was not able to get a beastly SI 24" driver into a commercial cinema space, but I was able to test a new local cinema that had around 16x individual 18" drivers from JBL from their top subs. These subs have something like 18mm of xmax. Using pure tones and ground plane measurement in the cinema itself, I was able to achieve the maximum output the system would allow. The subs never exceeded distortion thresholds while exceeding 120dB's at all frequencies down to 16hz. In fact, I hit over 130dB's at some frequencies. It made me realize that modern Cinema's with the best modern cinema speakers are actually putting out some pretty serious bass.
I am still not a huge fan of the overall sound/tonal balance. I actually took a lot of measurements that day and even listened to some music while I was in the cinema. I was left a bit unimpressed, and sadly, it seemed easily fixable. The biggest issues were poor response shape and obvious comb filtering. Commercial Cinema's should look into better screen materials, I suspect, and pay more attention to diffraction (again, just a suspicion). The Acoustics were also not great, the RT60 should have been flat around 1 second or less. They accept a sloped shape in commercial cinema's, but really, no reason it should or needs to be that way. This particular (and brand new state of the art space) was actually not very good. Uneven and poor shape with a general smile shape.
As for video, really? I've been so underwhelmed by the contrast ratio and black levels as of late. I feel like it's gotten much worse than it used to be? Doesn't it bother you? The new AMC Dolby cinemas have been the best I've seen so far and even they aren't great (Not JVC good). A few times were so bad I honestly wondered if something was setup wrong (As in there are no consumer projectors with black levels this bad), it looked like someone jacked up the brightness and raised the black level artificially.
