Will We Ever Return to the 90-Day Theatrical Window?

The Oscar-nominated director Sean Baker has been making headlines this month by calling out to filmmakers and insisting they demand a 90-day theatrical release window, addressing the growing trend in the industry of dumping blockbusters on VOD and streaming mere weeks after their theatrical debuts. Baker is absolutely right. There was a time where seeing a movie in the theater was of the utmost importance to not just cinephiles trying to boost their numbers on Letterboxd, but to the general consumer audience. These days, many people will see a compelling trailer and glowing reviews and still shrug it off with a “I’ll see it when it comes to streaming” comment. So with the average box office numbers dwindling against overblown budgets and theatrical release windows shrinking by the year, who is responsible for the imminent death of the moviegoing experience? 

I put out a tweet last week expressing my concern for the state of movie theaters and the film industry as a whole when news broke that after a mere 18 days at the box office, New Line Cinema’s latest thriller Companion would be appearing on VOD. The film released theatrically January 31st and is already available to watch at home by late February. It seems clear that we’re heading towards a future without a box office.

Companion came out 18 days ago. The shrinking gap between movies playing in theaters to being available at home is gonna be what ends up killing theaters. For big studio movies like this it should be a minimum of 90 days. https://t.co/hQltQHLOtA

— Jacob Harper (@JacobAtTheMovie) February 17, 2025

Many people agreed with my concern for the future of theaters, while others expressed a laundry list of reasons as to why movies leaving theaters faster than ever is actually a good thing. While I could certainly see an argument for this small gap between the silver screen and home video back in the peak of the coronavirus, which put a huge strain on cinemas, I find it hard to accept the pandemic-era practices as the norm. 

You can trace the ever-shrinking gap between seeing a movie in theaters and seeing it at home to a few variables, the 2020 pandemic being the prime suspect. The pandemic made way for streaming in unprecedented ways and had studio executives making some interesting choices to say the least, the biggest one being Warner Bros. same-day streaming release plans. This allowed audiences to watch theatrically-released movies on MAX the same day they appeared in theaters, featuring the year’s biggest blockbusters playing on the silver screen and in living rooms in tandem.

That’s how they handled James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad and Dennis Villenueve’s Dune. While this business model was short-lived, it was hard to put the box office genie back in the bottle as audiences began realizing they could just wait for the biggest movies of the year to come to them faster than ever before. 

I remember growing up in the early 2000s where an average film would play for months on end, before taking a long hiatus and building anticipation for the DVD release. Then by the time the movie was back in the hands of consumers via home video, it had felt like so long since its release that it was like you were watching it for the first time all over again. Now with the need for immediacy and convenience, studios opt to drop their films from theaters as soon as they see a dip at the box office and send them off to VOD for $20 a pop (and that’s if the movie is good).

This change in the business has also led to less money being circulated in the moviemaking system, with actors getting less residuals and studios more hesitant to take chances at the risk of a low theatrical performance, this was also brought up by Sean Baker in his passionate victory speech at the Film Independent Spirit Awards. 

Another contributor to the problem is the monopolisation of the screens, with Disney dominating and taking up screens leaving little room for anything else. This is evident with Marvel’s Deadpool and Wolverine and Pixar’s Inside Out 2 having the top two spots in theatrical runs of 2024. Both films are productions of the Walt Disney Corporation.

There are other contributors to the issue, not all of which are the fault of the studios. Many general audience members have grown tired of the poor theater etiquette that has plagued society, as well as the ridiculously overpriced tickets and concessions. This has led people pledging loyalty to theater chains of their choice by paying a subscription to something like AMC A-List or Cinemark Movie Pass. 

However, the biggest factor to this rapidly-developing issue lies in the hesitance of studios to keep something in theaters the second the money tap starts staggering. I got many responses on my social media post from people saying they were planning on seeing Companion around Valentine’s Day or the weekend after, with many of them disappointed to see it’s  out of most theaters, replaced by the latest Disney flick. I feel like if movies stayed in theaters longer more people would go see them, and maybe there’d a chance we could begin to undo the mental brainwashing to skip a movie at the theaters with expectations of seeing it on VOD by month’s end. But I worry that may be an optimistic pipedream.