You couldn't take it home to watch it on your VCR until October 29th, 1996, 11 months after it opened.

This is called the "theatrical window", when a movie is shown only in theaters, and it's gotten way smaller over time.

"Toy Story 4" was released in June of 2019.

To watch it at home, you only had to wait about 3 months.

This shrinking window is the result of a decades-long fight between movie theaters and movie studios.

But how much smaller can the window get?

Are movie theaters close to becoming a thing of the past?

Thanks to a Supreme Court case from the 1940s, movie studios and theater owners in the US are separate entities.

For a while, the only way to see a movie was to go to a theater.

But, pretty soon...

- Televison. - VHS. - DVD.

The days of theaters being the only way to watch a movie are long gone.

To defend against those new competitors, theater owners have struck deals with the movie studios to give them a window of exclusivity before a movie could be seen in any other format.

Movie studios agreed because it worked for them, too.

We created these windows because they were really good for the motion picture business.

That's Mark Zoradi, a former Disney executive.

From 1980 until 2010...

But, today, he's...

... the CEO of Cinemark Theaters.

The third-largest theater chain in the US and Canada.

Theater owners generally want a longer exclusive window because they only make money while a film is in theaters.

And even then, they're splitting ticket profits, roughly 50-50.

But movie studios have the opportunity to keep making money long after a film is shown in theaters.

In fact, it's become essential for studios to recoup their investments on expensive films.

In order for you to break even, then you've got to go right down the line at multiple bites in order to... to make that all back.

In the beginning, the minimum theatrical window was quite long.

But, obviously...

Over time, that's... that's shrunk.

With the introduction of DVDs, you had a window at roughly six months.

The window, prior to the pandemic, was essentially 74 days before a movie would go to electronic sell-through.

That means digital release you can buy on a platform like iTunes.

And then at 90 days, they would take it to DVD, VOD, and then after that, they would take it to pay television or streaming.

That's kind of how the sequence is.

But studios haven't always gotten their way.

In 2010, Warner Bros.'s parent company proposed a window of 30 days, which theater owners didn't agree to.

Netflix challenged the window a few years later, planning a movie release in IMAX and on Netflix at the same time.

Major theater chains banned their films.

One studio has been really persistent, though.

Universal has been, probably, the most public and aggressive about wanting to shorten the theatrical window.

In 2011, Universal made plans to release the film "Tower Heist" on demand 30 days after it hit theaters.

Some chains threatened to not show the film at all.

Universal ultimately backed down and kept their window at 90 days.

Ultimately, theaters need studios because they need movies to show.

Studios need theaters to make big money and get big press.

And that mutual need kept things stable.

For a while.

Until...

- Theaters are shut down due to the global pandemic... - Movie theaters were forced to close their...

- ... doors... - They've been trying to survive the coronavirus pandemic...

- ... in bankruptcy. - Bankruptcy could be in AMC's future.

The power dynamic shifted a lot during the pandemic.

In 2020, studios had newfound leverage, and one company struck while the iron was hot.

Universal had this movie, "Trolls World Tour", and they had two options.

One, they could delay it, or two, they could test what they've always wanted to do and put the movie in theaters and on video on demand on the same day.

And the caveat there is that there weren't any movie theaters open to play it.

"Trolls World Tour" quickly became the highest-grossing digital release ever.

It made more money for Universal in 3 weeks at home than the original film did in its theatrical run.

NBC Universal's head of film told the "Wall Street Journal", "As soon as theaters reopen, we expect to release movies on both formats."

In other words, in theaters and on demand at the same time.

The two biggest theater chains in the US fired back by saying they'd never show Universal films again.

But things were different now.

The major film studios had restructured to make streaming their primary focus.

Warner Bros. released their entire 2021 slate in theaters and on HBO Max at the same time.

Disney and Universal made a similar move.

With that upset came time for theater owners and Universal and the other studios, frankly, to start having those conversations and... and working out about what the future looks like, and what a post-pandemic model is.

In 2021, the major theater chains made deals to shorten the window.

Disney, Paramount, and Warner Bros. agreed to a 45-day window in 2022 and onwards.

But Universal got its own deal with the big theater chains.

They agreed to give theaters a portion of their video-on-demand revenue.

And, in return, they secured one of the shortest windows ever.

31 days for their biggest movies, 17 days on their smaller movies.

But one thing that's noticeably absent from all [of] these deals is any sign of a same-day release strategy, where a movie comes out on demand and in theaters at the same time.

At what seemed to be their most powerful moment, studios decided to keep the theatrical window in place.

That's partly because movie theaters are still pretty big money-makers for studios.

But it's also because movie theaters can sort of change how the public sees a movie.

Streaming customers value theatrical releases more highly.

It... it carries with it, sort of, an aura of quality.

It "eventizes" a movie; it's a shared experience that helps become almost like a zeitgeist within the culture.

The pandemic shifted the power dynamic towards movie studios and away from theaters.

But it also showed that they still need each other.

That doesn't necessarily mean theaters will be around forever.

But if they can survive a pandemic, maybe they're stronger than we thought.