06 Apr The Distribution Arc: How Long Does It Take a Hit Film to Go Free? [Reelgood Insights]
By David Markowitz
April 6, 2026| If you work in content acquisition or licensing, you have a mental model for how long a title stays behind a paywall before it appears on a free, ad-supported platform. That model is probably out of date.
We analyzed 7,966 popular movies (the top 10% by Reelgood popularity score) that had a calculable path from paid to free availability across the US market. The overall median time-to-free is 9.4 months, but the more useful number is the trend line: that median has compressed by nearly 60% since 2020.
For movies released in 2020, the median gap between first paid appearance and first free/AVOD listing was 6 months. By 2022, it was 4 months. For 2025 releases, it’s 2.5 months. The mean tells a similar story, dropping from 11 months (2020) to 3.4 months (2025).
Read more on Reelgood Insights.