How Long Do Movies Stay In Theaters? It’s Not Just About Ticket Sales

These days, the theatrical run of any given movie is as difficult to predict as ever. It used to be a straightforward matter of financial performance and whatever competitors were entering theaters in the weeks after a film’s release. Now, the popularity of streaming, video-on-demand services, the decline of the physical media market, and the rising cost of modern blockbusters have all played their part in changing the way cinemas and studios plan their theatrical windows.

Over the last several years, the average theatrical window has landed somewhere between 30 and 45 days across all wide releases, but that number oscillates year to year and film to film. Leading up to the mass closure of theaters during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, there were several franchises and types of movies that seemed like guarantees for major hauls and long runs. But with properties like the Marvel Cinematic Universe now struggling at the box office and more isolated events like the Barbenheimer phenomenon catching the zeitgeist, it can be hard to know in advance how well a given film will do in theaters.

Still, we can predict with some accuracy how long a film will stay on the big screen, going off a couple of factors. Box office performance in the first couple of weeks remains a strong indicator of longevity, but other things like streaming synergy and the time of year a movie comes out also play a role.

Despite an increasingly complex market, box office performance is still the main indicator of how long a movie will stay in cinemas. If your film is making money for theaters, they’ll want to keep showing it. If it’s a dud, it’s likely to be the next one out to make room for something that could be more successful.

“Oppenheimer” in 2023 is a great example — an R-rated, non-franchise film that nonetheless achieved the longest theatrical window of the year at 122 days. The reason? “Oppenheimer” is the third-highest-grossing R-rated movie ever and was the second-highest-grossing at the time of its release, only topped now by “Joker” and “Deadpool & Wolverine.” The Christopher Nolan film grossed just under $1 billion at the global box office. When you make that much money, the rest doesn’t really matter — theaters will want to keep playing your movie, and the studio will want to keep it there.

That said, the film still had its own star power in the form of its director. Nolan has become one of the biggest draws of the last few years, and anything he directs is given a certain degree of cultural clout and marketing support, which inevitably plays into the extended box office success.

As theaters reopened in the immediate aftermath of the first major COVID-19 wave worldwide, studios adopted hybrid release models to adapt to severely diminished in-person attendance. In many cases, major films dropped on their studios’ respective streaming platforms day-and-date with their theatrical premieres. Warner Bros. led the charge with this approach, with films like “Wonder Woman 1984” and “Godzilla vs. Kong” streaming on HBO Max at the same time that they premiered in cinemas.

In the years prior to COVID-19, it was standard for movies to have theatrical exclusivity for a period of around 90 days. That didn’t necessarily mean that the films would play that long, but it meant that digital and physical home releases wouldn’t drop until that period had expired. However, the damage of the pandemic, combined with other major industry shake-ups like the Writers Guild of America strike in 2023, led to this window being shrunk for many releases. Even after the day-and-date streaming model ended in the wake of the pandemic, many studios have continued to drop their films digitally much sooner than that previously standard 90 days.

While much of that is due directly to the impact of COVID-19 theater closures, streaming itself also played a major role in the shift.

At the same time that industry strikes and a global pandemic reshaped the film industry, streaming became the de facto king of media worldwide. What was once a small market inhabited by the likes of Netflix, Hulu, and HBO Max became incredibly crowded in the years surrounding the pandemic, with NBCUniversal, Disney, Paramount, and more all launching their own platforms.

That meant that even as theater attendance started to bounce back, studios had new incentives to bring fresh content to digital platforms as quickly as possible. Many films still drop for purchase on Blu-ray or VOD services after their theatrical windows and then later on streaming, so there is a buffer there, but with the bottom largely having dropped out of physical media sales, streaming has become the primary secondary market to eke extra value from a theatrical release.

While theaters are doing much better than they were immediately after the pandemic, they’ve never fully recovered. Things continue to look worrying as more and more people adopt at-home viewing — be it via streaming or digital rentals — as their primary method of watching both movies and shows. This has resulted in many studios cutting that pre-COVID 90-day theatrical exclusivity window significantly, moving media to home venues as quickly as possible to strike while the iron is still hot and grab viewers who just don’t want to go to the cinema anymore. While movie theater representatives have called for countermeasures in recent years, such as a standard 45-day exclusivity window across studios, such measures seem unlikely to take hold.

When we talk about how long movies stay in theaters, it’s also important to acknowledge the many different kinds of cinemas. While big chains like Regal and AMC rule the industry, they operate quite differently from smaller, independent theaters, which can be much more common and hold significant community pull in certain markets. If you’re a smaller theater with fewer screens, it’s harder to keep older movies running, as those limitations demand frequent changeover to bring in the latest releases.

Of course, the same goes for indie movies. While the opening weekend and first couple weeks are the most important for any film, word of mouth can give long legs to films that don’t immediately explode in popularity. Pixar’s “Elemental” from 2023 is a great example. However, if the movie in question doesn’t have the star power or marketing budget that a bigger release does, it likely won’t ever get the chance to build that word of mouth reputation.

As budgets balloon for blockbusters, any given year’s release slate hinges more and more on fewer and fewer “event” releases, rather than the steady stream of smaller blockbusters that used to be the norm. Individual films need to perform better and better to justify their gargantuan expenses, shrinking the “middle class” of cinematic releases.

Over the last few years, the standard theatrical run for a movie has been around 40 days. It’s enough time to pick up a bit of traction, but there unfortunately just isn’t a ton of room in there for films to make up for slow starts at the box office. All these factors — higher budgets, shrinking exclusivity windows, diminished attendance, and the rise of streaming — have put a bit of a stranglehold on the potential for any individual movie to become a theatrical success.

That said, all hope is not lost for those of us who still believe that no home experience can compare to seeing a film on the big screen with other movie lovers. Apocalyptic talk of theaters “dying” has circulated for years, and while the business has surely suffered, it’s still here. Similarly, unexpected sensations such as Barbenheimer and massive modern hits like “Avatar: The Way of Water” prove that plenty of people still want to come out to the cinema if they’re compelled to go. Hopefully, that sentiment will grow, even as the industry struggles to adapt to an ever-changing landscape.