The window: how many days a film now spends before leaving cinemas

The “window” is the time a film spends only in cinemas before it can be seen anywhere else. It is not a law: it is an agreement between those who produce and those who exhibit, and it is the piece holding up the cinema business. A theatre invests in screens, seats and staff because for a few weeks it is the only place in the world where that film can be seen.

Ninety days, and then nothing

The classic standard was ninety days. It held from the arrival of home video until 2020, when cinemas closed for the pandemic and studios were left with finished films and nowhere to open them. That year, Universal and the largest cinema chain in the United States agreed to cut the window to seventeen days for much of the catalogue. When theatres reopened, nobody went back to ninety: today the norm at the big studios is something like a month and a half, and less if a film opens soft.

The change has a cold logic: most of the box office is made in the first three weekends, so the remaining time on screen is worth less than the income digital rental would bring. For the exhibitor, by contrast, those final weeks are what let them programme cheap sessions and fill a Tuesday afternoon.

Netflix, which used to be the enemy of the concept

Netflix’s historical position was the opposite: simultaneous release, or a token window to qualify for awards. “Roma” (2018) ran three weeks; “Marriage Story” (2019), thirty days, which until now was its mark.

That is why what it has done with “La bola negra”, Spain’s Oscar entry, stands out: it opens in US cinemas on 16 October and stays exclusive there for forty-six days, until 2 December. It is the longest window it has ever given. This is not a conversion to the big screen: it is a campaign. Academy members vote better for what they have seen in a theatre, and a film that has been on screen for six weeks looks —and is— a different thing.

In Spain the maths comes out differently

Here the same film reached cinemas on 25 September with a local distributor, Elastica, and will be on Netflix on 2 December: about ten weeks. The difference is not philosophical, it is contractual. Every country is negotiated separately, which is why a film can have been at home for a month in one place and still be only on a big screen in another.

What is at stake is not nostalgia for the theatre: it is whether there is a stretch of time in which a film is a shared event rather than one more title on a list. Forty-six days do not bring back ninety, but they are the first time in years that someone has pulled the rope the other way. Checked on 20 October 2026.