How Studios and Theaters Actually Split a Movie’s Box Office Money

A studio announcing that a movie made $150 million on its opening weekend is citing money that, for the moment, belongs to thousands of individual theaters. That total is the gross — what ticket buyers paid at the register. What a studio actually banks, known in the industry as film rental, is set by contracts negotiated separately with each theater chain long before a release date is even picked.

Those contracts run on two mechanics: a “house nut” that lets a theater cover its own operating costs before any split occurs, and a percentage rate applied to what’s left, which is either fixed for a film’s entire run or slides downward week by week. Neither mechanic is disclosed on a film-by-film basis, but filings from the largest publicly traded theater chains show roughly where the money lands over a full year.

The House Nut and the Old Sliding Scale

Entertainment attorney Mark Litwak’s industry glossary defines the house nut as the weekly operating expenses of a movie theater, set as a negotiated figure and subtracted before distributor and exhibitor divide what remains. Litwak defines film rental itself, what a theater pays a distributor for the right to show a movie, as amounting to roughly half of the box office gross.

On top of the house nut, older contracts used a structure the industry calls a sliding scale, in which a distributor’s percentage share starts high in a film’s first weeks and steps down as the run continues, according to a description of the practice published by the New York nonprofit The Gotham. Litwak’s glossary also defines a related figure, the “floor,” as the minimum share a distributor is guaranteed regardless of a theater’s expenses, generally ranging from 70% down to 25% over the course of an engagement. The structure gave theaters an incentive to keep a film playing longer, since their cut rose the longer it stayed on a screen.

The 2024 Numbers
AMC Entertainment’s film exhibition costs — payments to distributors — came to $1,239.2 million, or 48.4% of its $2,560.5 million in 2024 admissions revenue, per the company’s year-end results filed with the SEC.

Aggregate Deals Replaced the Weekly Step-Down

Over the past decade, sliding-scale deals have mostly given way to what the industry calls an aggregate deal — a single percentage, negotiated in advance and applied to a film’s entire theatrical run rather than recalculated week to week. Wikipedia’s entry on film distribution defines an aggregate deal as splitting a film’s total box office revenue by a pre-agreed percentage between distributor and theater. Some aggregate rates are tied to how a film performs nationally, producing scales in which bigger hits trigger a higher distributor percentage.

That shift became public in 2015, when Disney’s proposed terms for “Avengers: Age of Ultron” drew objections from theater owners. Reporting at the time, citing the Wall Street Journal, said Disney sought 60% of North American box office admissions for the film, above the roughly 50% that reporting said studios typically pull in from ticket sales; the same reporting said an aggregate scale tied to national box office could push a distributor’s rate to a high record mark once a film crossed $400 million domestically, as “Avengers: Age of Ultron” was then projected to do. In Germany, exhibitors representing 686 screens boycotted the film that year after Disney raised its rental rate there from 47.7% of ticket sales to 53%, according to the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle, as cited by Celluloid Junkie.

No single figure applies to every release. In the UK, film-industry analyst Stephen Follows has written that a 55% split in a distributor’s favor is generally regarded as a strong deal, with independent-film distributors there typically receiving between 28% and 35% of income — evidence that major-studio tentpoles command sharply better terms than smaller releases.

What the Theater Chains’ Own Numbers Show

Because individual contracts are private, the clearest public evidence of the split comes from what publicly traded theater chains report to the SEC. AMC Entertainment’s fourth-quarter and full-year 2024 results show film exhibition costs — its term for payments to distributors for the right to show movies — at $1,239.2 million, or 48.4% of the company’s $2,560.5 million in admissions revenue for the year. That was up slightly from 48.0% in 2023, when film exhibition costs totaled $1,291.1 million against $2,690.5 million in admissions revenue.

Cinemark reports a related but not identical figure. Its film rental and advertising expense line, which bundles distributor payments together with the company’s own marketing costs, came to $859.6 million, or 56.5% of its $1,522.5 million in admissions revenue for full-year 2024. In the fourth quarter alone, the figure was $235.7 million, or 58.0% of $406.5 million in admissions revenue.

The two companies don’t define their cost lines the same way, so the figures aren’t a precise comparison. Still, both point to distributors collecting roughly half of what moviegoers spend on tickets across a full year — a blend of new releases still in their high-rate opening weeks and older titles that have slid to lower rates or left theaters entirely.

The number on a box office chart and the number that actually reaches a studio’s books are rarely the same figure.

Domestic Openings Pay More Than the Rest of the World

An analysis of “Barbie’s” 2023 release by the investing publication The Motley Fool put general industry terms at 55% to 60% of domestic box office revenue going to the studio in a film’s opening weekend, with that share shifting toward theaters in the weeks after. International terms run less favorably for studios, the analysis said, estimating that studios typically keep 25% to 40% of box office receipts earned outside the United States.

Applied to “Barbie,” whose worldwide box office reached $1.19 billion — $537 million domestic and $661 million international — the same analysis estimated Mattel’s revenue from the film at roughly $550 million, or about 46% of the total gross.

Why the Terms Rarely Become Public

A distributor’s obligations don’t end at negotiating a rate. Per Wikipedia’s entry on film distribution, the distributor collects the amount due from each theater, audits the exhibitor’s reported ticket sales to confirm accuracy, secures its own share, surrenders the theater’s portion, and transmits what’s left to the production company. That process runs separately with every theater chain and independent operator, none of which are required to publish their terms.

Theater owners are represented collectively by Cinema United, the trade group formerly known as the National Association of Theatre Owners, whose members operate more than 35,000 screens across the United States. The organization does not negotiate film-rental terms on its members’ behalf, however; individual film-rental percentages are still set contract by contract, which is why the number on a box office chart and the number that actually reaches a studio’s books are rarely the same figure.

Photo: Indiana Landmarks · CC BY 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons