“First, it’s important to know that every time you buy you a movie ticket, the theater obviously keeps a percentage of that money. Most theaters have a sliding scale of how much money they keep from tickets. As one study of theater contracts shows (“At the Movies: The Economics Exhibition Contracts” by Darren Filson, David Switzer, and Portia Besocke), studios keep about “perhaps 70% in the first week, 60% by the third week, and as low as 30% at the end of the run.”

Overall, some studios only earn a little under 50% of a film’s box office haul. For instance, according to Edward Jay Epstein in The Hollywood Economist: The Hidden Financial Reality Behind the Movies, theaters kept $139.8 million of the $237 million worldwide box office earned by Disney’s Gone in 60 Seconds. Meaning that Disney only kept a little over 40% of what this blockbuster movie generated.

However, when you factor in a theater’s sliding scale of profit, “a rule of thumb is that the studio will earn about 50% of a movie’s final US box-office take” – (this statistic is fully explained in this article from The Guardian by Gary Susman).”