10 Oct How Movies Increasingly Drive Streaming Revenue [The Hollywood Reporter]
BY ALEJANDRO ROJAS
October 10, 2025 | For years, the narrative has been that movies, in contrast to TV series, were in decline — casualties of a once-in-a-century pandemic that shuttered theaters and a double blow from prolonged industry strikes. But there’s new data that paints a different picture. Streaming services are, in fact, relying more than ever on films to keep their growth engines humming.
In the linear era, success was about scheduling and ratings. In streaming, it’s all about acquisition and retention. Every day, a platform lives or dies by its ability to attract and keep subscribers — audiences who are then monetized through subscriptions and ads. In this constant battle against churn, movies are proving to be one of the most efficient tools streamers have to keep viewers coming back.
At Parrot Analytics, where I lead the applied analytics team, we analyzed thousands of titles — both series and films — across Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Netflix, and Max. Using our demand and engagement data, we calculated how each title contributed to actual revenue in the U.S. market.
We built “lookalike” audiences to model both current and prospective subscribers and trained those models against reported revenues. This allowed us to estimate each title’s contribution to acquisition and retention — and to attribute total revenue between TV and film content.
The results were striking:
— In 2022, movies represented roughly 27 percent of total streaming revenues.
— By 2024, that share had climbed to nearly 50 percent.
— Within movie-driven revenue, Pay-2/3 and library windows now account for about two-thirds of total movie value, up from just 26 percent in 2022.