New films are commonly being shuttled off to home formats within days of appearing in cinemas. Here’s where we are in 2025…
In the US this week, two early 2025 minor-to-middling hits are arriving on video on demand services to rent. Dog Man was a chart topper with a $30m+ opening weekend just a fortnight ago, while Companion opened to strong reviews, and has barely been inside a cinema for three weeks.
Both are available now to watch at home via digital services if you live in America.
This is the latest fodder for what’s a growing hot topic in cinemas, with Anora director Sean Baker calling in a recent acceptance speech for the return of a 90 day minimum exclusivity window for cinemas. At the moment, most films struggle to get even 28 days, irrespective of how successful or otherwise they were. The cinema release sometimes feels like an inconvenience on the way to a digital platforms release.
To a lesser degree, this has been the case since the rise of VHS in the 1980s. The profile of a film came from cinemas, but for many film studios, the actual profit came with a video release. The cost of putting a movie into cinemas and marketing it ate into the bottom line, and served – as the old cliché went – as an extensive trailer for the VHS. When DVD boomed and exploded a fresh ton of money in the direction of studios, even more so. But this also mitigated risk, leading to a collection of films that could afford to stumble in cinemas, with home formats picking up the slack. We likely wouldn’t have had sequels to Austin Powers and The Bourne Identity without their successful home releases, but that’s another story.
In the streaming era, the digital machines require a fresh procession of high profile material (still can’t call it ‘content’, no matter how many times I read that word in a CEO’s statement), given that finding catalogue titles on even the best streaming service menu system is something of a chore. The current model appears to be make as much of a bang as possible at the cinema, and then before anybody’s forgotten, fast-track the movie in question to be watched at home. For a movie to take its time arriving on streaming and physical media now – such as Top Gun: Maverick a few years ago – is absolutely the exception rather than the norm.
The model of cutting theatrical windows to bare bones of course was a by-product of the global pandemic, that you may well have heard of. What’s notable is that this was no blip. As many predicted at the time, shortening a theatrical window has been a long time goal of Hollywood studios, and has caused spats in the past. Once that goal was achieved, there was absolutely no desire to roll that back.
This article then is being written in the middle of February 2025. As an experiment, I pulled up the list of the top ten grossing films at the American box office in January of 2025, and it reads like this:
1. Mufasa: The Lion King
2. Sonic The Hedgehog 3
3. Moana 2
4. Nosferatu
5. Wicked
6 A Complete Unknown
7. Den Of Thieves: Pantera
8. One Of Them Days
9. Wolf Man
10. Babygirl
Doing a search of American video on demand services, nine of those films are already available to watch, legally, at home.
By some way of mitigation, there are November and December releases in that list, but also, they’re November and December releases still bringing in sizeable amounts of money. In the case of Wicked in particular, the movie has grossed $472m in US cinemas since its 22nd November 2024 release, and was still packing them in when the digital version dropped.
It reminded me of when Warner Bros didn’t even give Beetlejuice Beetlejuice a calendar month in cinemas, even when it was still number three in the box office charts.
A word too for Nosferatu and Wolf Man. In the case of the former, not only was it announced that the digital version was coming fairly quickly after the movie’s release, but also, we were told that an extended cut was going to be available. Not in cinemas, just on home formats. Wolf Man meanwhile was on people’s television sets in under three weeks.
Even looking forward to February’s chart in the US, up until 18th February 2025, half of the films that make up the top ten grossers are available already on home formats in American homes. At least two of the remaining titles – Love Hurts and Heart Eyes – are surely not far away, and few would bet against them getting a similar release by the end of the month. It’s the point where it hurts a release for all but the biggest films, I’d suggest: that we, as audiences, are becoming trained to give a film a miss at the cinema, as it’ll be out on digital by the end of the month anyway.
The outlier, incidentally, in the January list is A Complete Unknown, and credit to Disney/Searchlight Pictures for holding its nerve there. Notwithstanding that the movie has topped the charts here in the UK, awards movies are gold dust to independent cinemas in particular. Disney took a lot of criticism from indies for fast-tracking films such as The Banshees Of Inisherin and The Menu to its streaming platform while their theatrical releases were still doing well. Holding A Complete Unknown theatrically for longer is surely a move that’s benefitting the film, and also benefitting theatrical distribution.
Theatrical distribution, though, is what’s at threat.
When a film that’s grossed nearly half a billion dollars in just one country is sent to on demand services in a matter of weeks, it’s perhaps unsurprising that so many cinemas are looking for other ideas to keep the lights on. The rise in event screenings and re-releases of older films may not be directly linked to shorter theatrical windows for blockbusters and such like, but particularly now, there’s still some connective tissue.
Quentin Tarantino in fairness to him has also used his megaphone here to call out the short-changing of theatrical releases, and perhaps it needs more than him and Sean Baker to use their moment at the microphone to do so. Imagine if all the winners at the Oscars canned their speeches, turned to the camera, and made the same argument instead?
Film viewing habits of course change (and it’s hard to ignore that Wicked brought in a sizeable amount of money on its on demand debut – but would it have done that anyway?), and technology evolves. But for well over 100 years, the idea of getting people into a room to watch something together has held really rather well. To see something special sacrificed to make a quarterly return look better is both disappointing and, well, unsurprising.
Movie studios have a decision to make here. Filmmakers think the cinema matters. A lot of audiences still think it matters. But do the people who have to submit quarterly reports to shareholders? The state of the January 2025 chart suggests a quiet tipping point. If, indeed, things haven’t already been irreversibly tipped…
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