It was a lucrative holiday period at the North American box office these past two weeks, with titles like Avatar: Fire and Ash, The Housemaid, Marty Supreme, Anaconda and Zootopia 2 bringing a welcome diversity of hit movies after an underwhelming fall. But during that period, the biggest single-day gross posted by any release wasn’t really a gross – or a movie. It was the series finale of the Netflix TV show Stranger Things.
Netflix made a deal to put the feature-length episode in theaters simultaneously with its streaming debut, and estimates put the numbers for the 24 hours’ worth of shows, beginning at 8pm on New Year’s Eve and continuing throughout New Year’s Day, around $25m. That’s bigger than any single day of Avatar: Fire and Ash after its opening weekend. In fact, if the Stranger Things release banked over $30m, as some estimated, that would make it the second-biggest 24 hours for any release in December, beaten only by Avatar 3’s opening day.
As it happens, those numbers are a little dicey – not just because Netflix doesn’t release box office grosses for its occasional theatrical releases, but because contractual issues dictated that the tickets for this event were technically free. At most cinemas showing the Stranger Things finale, attenders were actually purchasing $20 concession vouchers to reserve their seats. But that only underlines how lucrative this experiment was for theaters: rather than splitting the pot with the distributor as usual, that money presumably went entirely to exhibitors.
Not every non-traditional release offers such a sweet deal. But various distributors and theaters alike are getting more creative about how to prop up a business that’s become increasingly dominated by big event movies, many of which are not as reliably huge as they used to be. Last fall, hot Broadway tickets like Hamilton (filmed with its original cast) and Merrily We Roll Along were available in movie theaters nationwide. Last year, Taylor Swift provided an injection of cash to follow up her 2023 concert film when a release party for her new album The Life of a Showgirl made $50m worldwide despite being cobbled together from one new music video, a series of no-frills lyric videos, and a bit of behind-the-scenes material. BTS put out a whole series of remastered concert films in the fall, and Netflix dipped into both its own fandom and a pop-music frenzy by arranging a series of theatrical engagements for its feature phenom KPop Demon Hunters. Like the Stranger Things release, this included a rare deal with AMC, the biggest movie theater chain in the US, and an unofficial enemy of the streamer. (Before 2025, only one Netflix feature has ever played at AMCs: a single-week engagement of Glass Onion. AMC has largely rejected the company’s appeal toward a shorter theatrical window.)
It’s not all pop music, the stalwart opera and theater broadcasts, or sports programming, either. Targeted rereleases have become a multiplex staple, sometimes through such distributors as Fathom (which release multiple classics nationally every month) and sometimes direct from studios like Universal, who put Back to the Future and Jaws on Imax screens during slow periods for new releases last year. In some cities, the multiplexes have developed their own rep scenes; some theaters in the Regal chain, for example, have played a different “old” movie (ranging from 1930s monster classics to mid-century musicals to Christopher Nolan hits) every day since last September, something that’s continuing at least through January.
It adds up to a strange, circular phenomenon. Entertainment that for much of the late 20th and early 21st century was associated with home viewing – sports, TV shows, rewatches of old favorite movies – has become potential big-screen fodder, even as countless feature films with major stars have been consigned to a straight-to-streaming release. Netflix and their ilk have helped train audiences to wait for streaming. Rather than resist that training, audiences have acquiesced and more or less refused to rush out and see as many movies as they used to (much less roll up to the theater just for the sake of seeing whatever’s playing). Yet there’s clearly still a collective pull towards gathering outside the living room.
Some of this shift is probably sheer accounting. As much as some will still complain about movie theater prices or insist that their 75in flatscreen is roughly equivalent to a 50ft screen, good seats for a big-screen presentation are still more affordable (and easier to obtain) than the equivalent at a live-music show or sporting event, with a greater communal rush (and louder sound system) than what’s available in most homes.
Some of it, though, is probably also a direct product of those shortened theatrical windows, and maybe a canny adaptation to them. Depending on how old you are, you might recall a time when movies would play in theaters for weeks or months – and even shorter theatrical releases would be followed by three to six to even 12 months before the movie in question would make it to home video formats. In 2026, it’s not unusual for a movie to be available to rent at home within two or three weeks of its opening weekend (which a lot of viewers have rounded in their heads to “on Netflix soon”, even if the reality is still often theatrical movies taking months to reach Netflix, if they’re licensed there at all). With a few big-ticket exceptions, the difference between paying to see a movie opening weekend or as soon as it hits premium VOD is negligible, a question less of necessity than preference. If you prefer to see a movie on the big screen, you’ll probably make time. If you could go either way, well, that decision will quickly be made for you.
By the same token, though, if it’s not unusual for a movie to hit some form of home video pretty quickly, then maybe it also erases any lingering sense of taboo over audiences paying an admission to watch something readily available elsewhere. Yes, you can watch Back to the Future or the Stranger Things finale or a big game at home, sometimes for free (or what feels like free, anyway; even sorta-free options require at least a reliable internet connection). Even that original-cast Hamilton released in September was actually streaming on Disney+ for years. But if everything is available everywhere – or anyway, if a lot of entertainment is available in a greater variety of ways – then there’s not always a reason to stick with the same method for every single block of time, any more than there’s reason to swear off ever eating food from a restaurant that you could learn to cook at home.
Home-viewing advocates might roll their eyes at the outsized wonder with which some frequent moviegoers speak of the theatrical experience. Yet if theaters do survive – something most people who aren’t Netflix shareholders would probably ultimately favor – it may be due in large part to some immutable sense of reverence that they carry. To go out and see Stranger Things or a Jaws rerelease or a big soccer game at a movie theater is an act of devotion that defies simple expedience. A few viewers may have checked out those KPop Demon Hunters screenings without watching the movie on Netflix first; most of them, though, were attending to sing along with songs they already knew. A certain section of moviegoers will always prize the thrill of making that devotional choice sight unseen, for movies that could be great or terrible. But for others, maybe the cherished and the unproven are just switching places.
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