How fast do movies go from theaters to streaming?
We measure the theater-to-digital window: the gap between a film's US theatrical release and the day it can first be rented or bought digitally. Subscription streaming usually follows weeks to months later. The data refreshes automatically with each site update.
Streamable this week
Every new way to watch at home from the last 7 days, straight from our nightly availability tracking. Tap a film for its full release timeline and where to watch.
Fresh from theaters: new to rent or buy
Just added to subscription services
The window collapsed in 2020 and never came back
Before the pandemic, a typical wide release took about 81 days to reach digital rental. The collapse came in stages: 2020 releases still took 46 days, then 2021 fell to 18. It has settled near 39 days since, roughly half the old window.
Median window by year (2015 to today)
In theaters now: when to expect digital
Recent releases that haven't reached digital yet. Dates marked scheduled are announced; the rest are our estimate from the current median window. Click through for each film's full timeline.
Fastest to digital (since 2019)
- Black Widow (2021)0 days
- Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)0 days
- Cruella (2021)0 days
- Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)0 days
- Raya and the Last Dragon (2021)0 days
- Mortal Kombat (2021)0 days
- The Matrix Resurrections (2021)0 days
- The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021)0 days
- Jungle Cruise (2021)0 days
- El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (2019)0 days
Longest theatrical runs (since 2019)
- Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero (2022)327 days
- Ne Zha (2019)325 days
- Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle (2025)319 days
- Suzume (2022)216 days
- Ne Zha 2 (2025)214 days
- How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies (2024)211 days
- Peninsula (2020)204 days
- Weathering with You (2019)202 days
- The Boy and the Heron (2023)200 days
- Jujutsu Kaisen 0 (2021)187 days
Common questions
How long after theaters can I rent a movie at home?
For films released since 2025, the median is 39 days from US theatrical release to digital rental or purchase, measured across 65 films tracked at feelsalike.com. Big hits often hold out longer, and underperformers show up sooner.
Is that the same as coming to Netflix or another subscription service?
No. The first digital release is rental and purchase (Apple TV, Amazon, and the other stores). Inclusion with a streaming subscription usually follows weeks to months after that, depending on each studio's output deals.
Have theatrical windows gotten shorter?
Dramatically. The median was 81 days for 2015 to 2019 releases, collapsed during the pandemic (the 2021 median fell to 18 days), and has settled near 39 days since 2022.
Methodology. A window is the number of days between a film's earliest US theatrical release date and its earliest US digital (rent/buy) release date, both from TMDB's release-date records. Same-day digital releases count as 0-day windows. We exclude windows of 400+ days (usually a storefront listing an older film, not a contemporaneous release) and negative windows (streaming-first films whose theatrical date is a later re-release). Films measured are the popular titles in our catalog with both dates on record, so figures describe wide-interest releases rather than all films. The headline figure uses films from the last two release years because older titles' digital dates often reflect when a storefront first listed them. For the same reason every published figure and the downloadable dataset start at 2015: earlier years have too few measurable titles for a stable median. A film's year is the year of its US theatrical date. Future scheduled digital dates are shown on film pages but not counted until they arrive.
Cite freely with a link: feelsalike.com/streaming-windows · Download the raw dataset: windows.csv (title, release dates, window in days for every film measured) · Data last refreshed October 5, 2026.