Still "streaming-first", but Netflix now gives a handful of films a traditional cinema window and publishes their box office.
For years the question around Netflix and cinemas was simple: would the company ever really play the theatrical game? On this week's third-quarter earnings call, Netflix's Ted Sarandos gave the most detailed answer yet. According to TheWrap's report, the short version is that Netflix remains a streaming-first business, but its approach to cinemas has quietly matured into something with several different tracks.
Three kinds of release
Netflix expects to put around 30 films into theaters in 2026, about the same as last year, and each title gets its own plan. In practice they fall into three groups.
- Awards runs. Most theatrical titles open in a small number of screens, a few of them theaters Netflix owns, mainly so they qualify for awards. They arrive on the service a couple of weeks later.
- The traditional window. A handful of films now get a conventional 45-day exclusive window, and Netflix reports their box office publicly, something it long refused to do.
- Wide family releases. Two big-franchise family titles, Greta Gerwig's adaptation of C.S. Lewis's The Magician's Nephew and the animated Charlie vs. the Chocolate Factory, are planned for wide release next year because their worldwide fan bases justify it.
The numbers Netflix chose to share
The historical epic La Bola Negra, from directors Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo, played for 47 days before reaching Netflix. TheWrap reports it averaged $69,000 per screen in the US, the second-highest per-screen average on record for a non-English-language film, behind only Parasite. Other titles mentioned include Peter Berg's The Mosquito Bowl, which gets a smaller theatrical release, and David Fincher's The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, with Brad Pitt, which gets a two-week IMAX run. Quentin Tarantino wrote the script and is a producer.
What is still unexplained
Sarandos did not say why two animated family films, Steps and Brad Bird's Ray Gunn, will not get wide releases while others will. Netflix has also only just started publishing grosses, so it has about one week of public data. Sarandos said the company plans to reassess in around six months.
Why this matters for viewers
If you care about seeing a film on a big screen, the practical takeaway is that Netflix is no longer all-or-nothing. A film's cinema availability will depend on its ambitions: awards contenders get a short, selective run, while a few event releases get the full treatment. For filmmakers and exhibitors, the biggest change is transparency. Public box office numbers make it possible, for the first time, to judge Netflix's theatrical results by the same yardstick as everyone else's.
Source: TheWrap
