movie is a countable noun whose plural form is movies. In this sense, the movies are "cognitively defined [multiple] films", and the singular is the movie ("A movie that is cognizant")。
However, in American English, The Movies is used in other ways. For such usage, there is no The Movie. As.
Example sentence 1】He took her to the movies[Collins Senior Scholar's Dictionary].
Example sentence 2] in those days, we went to the movies every week[Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English].
Example sentence 3】We went to the movies last night[Cambridge Dictionary of Senior Scholars].
In the above example sentence, movies is equivalent to a cinema in British English, that is, when speaking British English, you need to replace the movies with the cinema.
Obviously, if you understand it as a cinema, you can't have the movie.
Some dictionaries directly interpret the movie in [example sentences 1,2,3] as cinema, which is a bit blunt. The Cambridge Scholastic Content Dictionary is more literally defined as the showing of movies at a theater, i.e. movies are "screening activities".
Whether it's taking someboday to or going to, it's all about participating in the corresponding activities. Because the norm of "broadcast activities" is multiple, movies with plus s are used. To emphasize, this movie is an "event", not a "venue".
Note that even if the movies in [Example Sentences 1,2,3] are replaced with British English, the past Go to the Cinema and Take Somebody to the Cinema are also borrowed from the surface activities (just like the school of go to school is not a "school building", but a "school learning activity") The preposition of the following example sentence has a strong sense of position, but the semantics of the whole sentence are still focused on activities, example sentence 4] why were you at the movies all by yourself?[Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English].
The following sentence is almost the place.
Example sentence 5] what's on/showing at the movies this week?[Cambridge Dictionary of Senior Scholars].
The THE in GO to the Cinema can be "the building of a cinema in a certain cognition", but in terms of the semantics of the previous paragraph, the cinema is an activity, just like the school of GO TO SCHOOL. The reason why The Cinema has a definite article is because "watching movies" is a novelty that has appeared in the last 130 years (December 28, 1895 is recognized as the birth date of cinema), and in the early days [now weakened] it was a particularly lofty thing, so the cognitive presence was particularly strong, so the definite article ("On-campus learning activities"not something particularly noticeable).
The American English Go to the Movies is comparable to the British Go to the Cinema, so the THE cannot be removed, and movies without the THE are more easily understood as "multiple movies".
In addition to being the iconic picture of cinemas having "multiple films", the film industry is too, so The Movies is referred to the film industry, such as.
Example sentence 6】She has worked in the movies all her life[Cambridge Dictionary of Senior Scholars].
In (the) movies also refers to "in a movie" (which is the antonym of "in reality"), such as:
Example sentence 7: He couldn't believe his luck it was the sort of thing that only happened in the movies.[Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English].
Again, the movies from [Example Sentence 1] to [Example Sentence 7] do not have the usage of the singular version of the movie. Dictionaries often label the noun meaning of this type of usage as plural noun.