With More People Streaming New Releases at Home, Are Movie Theaters Dead?

New viewing behavior is likely to stay, so now what?

As the pandemic disrupted our lives in so many ways, consumers embraced streaming video services, including new movie releases. This evolution accelerated in the past 18-plus months, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that some movie viewing habits will not return to pre-pandemic ways.

Despite various in-person services opening back up, including movie theaters, many consumers have become accustomed to paying for and watching new movies at home, skipping the in-theater experience. And these behaviors may continue to stick with some portion of the population going forward, with a little less than half (47%) of U.S. adults saying that they would be willing to go to the movies in the next week.

The combination of explosive growth of streaming subscriptions, consumers’ increasing comfort with the streaming ecosystem and with continued hesitance to return to theaters is driving fragmentation among movie viewers.

What do consumers have to say?

There are certainly many industry economic issues to work out to find the balance between theaters and streaming, but we cannot lose touch with consumer preferences. It’s important we hear directly from consumers to plan successfully.

ENGINE has found that 36% of U.S. adults report to have purchased a new movie release to stream at home and will continue to do so in the future. When broken down by generation demographic, this rises to 54% for millennials, but is only 14% for baby boomers. Those with children in the home are twice as likely than those without children at home to purchase a new release, at 54% vs. 26%.  A substantial number of consumers have made purchases of some movies as well, with 25% of millennials having paid to watch Black Widow at home, while 24% of Gen Zs and millennials paid for Mulan.

When asked if they would consider paying to stream a movie at home rather than go to a movie theater, 63% say they would consider it, with Gen Z (72%) and millennials (71%) the most willing to pay to stream a new movie release at home. 

With HBO and Disney both announcing that new movie releases will run exclusively in theaters for 45 days before they are available for streaming, we asked consumers what they thought about the different viewing options. The majority of consumers (55%) would prefer to wait until movies become available via streaming, compared with 32% willing to go to a theater and 13% preferring to pay $20-$30 to view immediately at home. Gen Z and millennials are less willing to wait the 45 days, with 25% of Gen Z and 26% of millennials preferring to pay for and stream movies at home. However, baby boomers are notably not at all likely to pay to stream premieres at home at only 4%.

Interestingly, the presence of children limits consumers’ patience for streaming—45% of Americans with children at home will wait 45 days to stream. This rises to 60% for those without children at home. Factors here likely include the desire to keep kids well entertained, but also a different expense calculation when the cost of childcare to go attend a movie is factored in.

Overall, half of U.S. adults said that watching movie premieres at home was cheaper and more comfortable than going to the movie theater. But, on the other hand, 35% of these consumers miss the large theater screen, and only 20% said that watching the movie premiere at home was an overall better experience than going to the theater. This further suggests fragmentation into distinct types of movie consumers, with a large portion open to influence between theaters and streaming.


As TV screens continue to become bigger and cheaper, and new behavior patterns become more ingrained, streaming will continue to be a choice for many movie fans, even if it means waiting for the exclusive theater window to pass.

With this change in consumer habits, new metrics to measure the success of new movie releases should be considered, as box office results alone won’t capture the whole story. And ensuring consumers are well informed about how a studio release relates to a specific streaming platform will be critical to ensure informed purchases are made.

Don Simons is the CEO of ENGINE Insights in North America, and a member of ENGINE’s management board. His 25-year career has been in insights, learning the business from the ground up, and Don has a particular focus on CX research and the application of technology to enhancing business impact of insights investments.