Streaming Can Wait: How Longer Theatrical Windows Became the New Gospel

Of all of the Hollywood actors and directors who garnered cheers at last week’s CinemaCon, no one received a louder ovation than Steven Spielberg. The legendary director himself applauded Universal for replacing its policy of bringing its movies to premium on-demand as early as 17 days after theatrical release with 45 days starting in 2027 — and added a plea for more.

“This is a development that reinforces their reputation as a company that will support the best possible version of the moviegoing experience,” he said from the Las Vegas stage last week. “But today I gotta be greedy: Do I hear 60 days? 90 days? 120 days? Those days have got to come back!”

It’s hard to say if they will, but even as recently as 12 months ago, it seemed like the days of a 45-day window might never return. At last year’s CinemaCon, Cinema United CEO Michael O’Leary called on studios to make that length an industry standard, but around the convention, studios were reluctant to make any sort of sweeping commitments, while theater owners privately vented their frustrations.

The worry for many, as Amazon MGM domestic distribution chief Kevin Wilson explained at the time, was being stuck with a stinker that gets booted out of theaters in short order and is then stuck in limbo until a hard-and-fast window has closed.

“The last thing we want is for a title go into theaters, and then we’re out of a significant number of theaters after three weekends, and now our movie is sitting on the shelf for however long is left in the window,” Wilson said. “I think there’s a middle ground that’s going to work for both studio and exhibitor. And over the next several months we’re going to try to find out what that is.”

Maybe the middle ground was 45 days. Because at CinemaCon 2026, every single studio, not just Universal, reiterated its commitment to windows of at least that length. Theater owners told TheWrap that the willingness of studios to increase their theatrical windows will make for an even healthier box office in 2026 and 2027, even as some smaller theaters are having to get creative with showtimes to fit both the big blockbusters and the indie family films that have been keeping them afloat in the lean times. Longer windows, everyone said, is the key to a healthy box office.

“Windows aren’t a point of contention anymore, and I think that is a major development in the relationship between studios and exhibition,” said Daniel Loria, SVP and editorial director at The Boxoffice Company.

Amazon MGM’s biggest box office hit to date, “Project Hail Mary,” is still legging out well in theaters — it’s at $285 million domestic and counting — and will be kept in theaters for several more weeks with the exact window length still to be determined.

And while that studio is still keeping that flexibility of changing window lengths for each of their films, an Amazon MGM insider pointed out that “Mercy” and “Crime 101,” two films that were making less than $1 million in weekend grosses well before the 45-day mark, honored that window length before they were streaming on Prime Video.

Before bringing out the movie stars for their studio presentations, other executives at CinemaCon made it a point to reaffirm their commitment to longer windows, from Sony Pictures chairman Tom Rothman to Warner Bros. Pictures co-chair/CEOs Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy. Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison invoked the company’s 45-day window pledge as he sought to convince exhibitors that his planned merger with Warner Bros. wouldn’t be the crushing blow to their business that Cinema United is warning regulators it will be.

Streaming can wait

And then there was Disney’s global distribution chief Andrew Cripps and SVP/general sales manager Matthew Kalavsky, who were quite happy to point out that since the release of “Avatar: The Way of Water” in December 2022, the studio has committed to the longest windows of any studio in the industry.

In 2025, the studio had an average theatrical window before PVOD release of 57 days — no film was streaming on Disney+ or Hulu until at least three months after it first hit theaters. In fact, December’s “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” per the wishes of James Cameron, was only released on PVOD at the end of March and isn’t expected to get a Disney+ release for at least another month.

“It is good to see that the industry has caught up to what we already know,” said Cripps, who was at Warner Bros. when then-CEO Jason Kilar initiated the day-and-date “Project Popcorn” program that saw all of the studio’s 2021 films get simultaneous theatrical and streaming release. “Longer windows benefit everybody in this industry.”

So when Spielberg asks Hollywood if it can keep pushing that industry-wide window mark even further, the 60-day window is one that at least Disney is already practicing. And as Classic Cinemas CEO Chris Johnson pointed out, it’s not just the long PVOD and streaming windows that put Disney in theaters’ good graces. It is also the moratorium on any advertising for its films’ Disney+ premiere until right before that streaming release arrives.

“That advertising embargo is huge, because it’s really the release on streaming services that is the big thing theaters were worried about,” Johnson said. “However long the window is, if other studios can hold off on telling the public when a film is coming out on streaming, that helps us.”

Granted, part of why Disney commits to such longer windows more frequently is that it has historically been far more tentpole heavy with its theatrical slate, even after adding cheaper, non-franchise titles from the former Fox labels 20th Century Studios and Searchlight.

By maximizing the theatrical windows on its biggest hits like “Zootopia 2,” Disney not only recoups the hundreds of millions it pours into producing and marketing these films, but builds up the potential for years of ancillary revenue that make up for any losses taken on the films that don’t work out, like “Tron: Ares” or “Snow White.”

But Loria said he feels optimistic that with this industry-wide commitment to a 45-day minimum, theaters will see more films stretch well past that baseline, which can help slowly reverse the assumption among the public that films will be out faster than they were before the pandemic.

“Remember, the minimum isn’t ‘most films get 45 days.’ That’s the baseline,” he said. “I think we’re going to see more films that are hits like ‘Project Hail Mary,’ the ones that theaters really want to stick around, get much longer windows. The theaters don’t care about the films that don’t work out, and I think for the studios, a 45-day window is much better than 90 days in that situation. They didn’t want to sit on their hands for two months until a home release, but they can deal with two weeks if a theatrical run is short.”

If that is the compromise, then that’s good for the theaters too, because they will soon find themselves with a problem that they’ve longed to have: too many films.

A family thing

For theaters with eight screens or fewer, hard decisions will be coming in the months ahead about which films to keep on screens — particularly specialty and indie films in parts of the country that have specific tastes — and which ones have to get their runs on screens curtailed.

Over the past five years, while studios struggled to get their slates back to full strength between pandemic-induced backlogs and the 2023 strikes, theaters turned to alternatives from the festival acquisitions of Neon to newcomers like Angel and Fathom Entertainment, who were happy to fill in the gaps in the release calendar left behind by the big players.

Angel’s EVP and head of distribution Brandon Purdie said that after the 2023 hit “Sound of Freedom” got the Provo studio on the map, it was its flexibility to work around what screen times theaters had available that built the long-lasting partnerships it needed.

“We told theaters, ‘Give us the times that you can,’ and that was something they really appreciated. You have to be willing to meet them halfway if you want to work in distribution,” Purdie said.

Other indie distributors are taking that same patient, flexible approach. Take Viva Pictures, a new player that just released the family animated film “The Pout-Pout Fish” in 1,854 locations last month. The film didn’t make a big splash at the box office, grossing just $2.8 million, but it stood as Viva’s widest release to date, made possible by its willingness to split screens with other films, taking daytime screenings until 4 p.m. and then turning the theaters’ screens over to the likes of “Project Hail Mary” and “Ready or Not 2.”

“Partners like Cinemark and Cinepolis have seen significant increases in per-screen averages on our titles, while also capturing additional concession revenue from family audiences during daytime hours and stronger ticket sales for adult programming in the evenings,” said Viva founder and managing partner Victor Elizalde. “What makes these programs work is that we layer them on top of intentional release timing, scheduling our films when the majors have left a gap in family content, which creates a consistent, habit-forming flow of quality programming that exhibitors can count on.”

Distributors like Viva that provide indie family entertainment will have their work cut out for them in the months ahead. With Warner Bros. Animation set to return to the theatrical front with “The Cat in the Hat” this November, all five major Hollywood studios will have family animation coming to cinemas in 2027. With families more critical to box office recovery than ever, it’s a level of high franchise output that theaters have been craving, which means the likes of Angel and Viva will have to be more creative with their release and marketing strategies to maintain their foothold.

Between that increased supply and the industry-endangering windowing experiments coming to an end, theaters are bullish on 2026 even though many exhibitors have told TheWrap that they are still nervous about an impending Paramount-Warner merger that is beyond their control. But Greg Marcus, CEO of Marcus Theaters, is keeping hope that the numbers will keep ticking up and that the newfound 45-day industry standard could grow into something bigger.

“If we can keep building to a point where the windows are two months to PVOD and five months to streaming, I think we’d be in really great shape,” he said.

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