It's a business transaction where contracts are the norm. Sony may not be very flexible on terms, but no one is forced to buy their projectors and agree to the terms.
> why would we want to lean on something as slow and complex as antitrust laws
We would if consumers had no other choice but to buy Sony projectors only - that doesn't seem to be the case, though.
I don’t know how much choice movie theaters have. As I understand it, these projectors read directly from a hard drive, and are heavily regulated to avoid piracy. According to the Wikipedia article [1] there are only 4 approved manufacturers, and until very recently Sony had the only 4k model.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_cinema (see the projectors for digits cinema section)
We already have simple systems that handle "you broke my stuff" fairly well - why would we want to lean on something as slow and complex as antitrust laws to resolve this? The Epic vs Google lawsuit started in 2020. 3 years is a long time to wait to collect damages for broken projectors.