When was the last time you went to a movie theater? That question is a much more difficult one for many Americans than it used to be. There was a time when going to a new movie was a weekly event for some families, but the COVID-19 pandemic changed everything about American moviegoing habits when it forced theaters to shut down in 2020.

At a time when audiences needed the distraction of entertainment more poignantly than ever, studios decided to begin releasing blockbuster movies directly to streaming. Movies like “Dune” were released to on-demand streaming services immediately, helping create a new kind of film-watching behavior that theater chains are still trying to recover from.

To be fair, studios are trying to help reverse course, at least a little bit, however, that has led to a new kind of confusion among viewers. Nowadays, it seems almost impossible to predict when you will be able to watch a new movie on streaming. For some studios, movies will arrive on their on-demand platforms within six weeks, while others will take up to nine months to make a film available to watch at home. New data from Ampere Analysis shows that theatrical windows are increasing; widely-released movies distributed in the United States by Disney, Paramount, Sony, Universal, and Warner Bros. Discovery took an average of 87 days to reach subscription streaming services.

The average number of days it takes studios to release movies to streaming platforms is up nearly 20% from 2022. At that time, just over 25% of these movies took 90 days or more to reach streaming, a sign that studios are well past the COVID mentality of releasing movies to their streamers quickly. Sony — which doesn’t have a streaming service of its own — has the longest average release window of major studios, at 106 days.

As the data shows, most studios have a wide range of release windows for films released in 2024. The exception is Paramount, which didn’t make fans wait for a movie for longer than 60 or so days at any point last year. Each studio adheres to the 45-day minimum agreed upon between producers and theater chains in the wake of the pandemic, but outside of that floor, there are essentially no rules, leading to a difficult-to-discern pattern for audiences who just want to know when their new favorite film will be available to stream at home.

Money is a big part of the equation here. Studios don’t make nearly as much from a movie streaming on-demand as they do from theatrical distribution, and with streamers like Disney+, Max, Paramount+, and Peacock still trying to ramp up to sustained profitability while their parent companies’ cable channels continue to lose revenue, having longer theatrical windows helps keep a key cash pipeline open. The vast majority of revenue generated by films in their initial weeks of theatrical release goes back to the studio, with the theater chains banking on the increased concession sales that accompany the initial rush to see movies. However, the longer that a film remains in cinemas, the percentage of ticket sales that goes to the theaters increases. So while keeping movies in theaters longer can help studios make extra money via ticket sales, it helps the cinemas themselves even more.

However, there are tangential benefits to keeping movies in theaters past the agreed-upon 45 days. That has to do with the extra attention films generate by still being available to see on the big screen. The visibility of movies in cinemas, and the marketing associated with it, helps generate extra revenue for the studios from fans who want to watch the movie at home, and don’t want to wait for it to arrive on the appropriate on-demand platform.

That is where another money-making avenue emerges. There is an intermediary step between theaters and on-demand streaming services that many viewers tend to ignore. Premium video-on-demand (PVOD) platforms like Prime Video allow viewers to watch movies that are still in theaters, with a rental price at or around $30 for a one-time watch. Transactional video-on-demand (TVOD) services are essentially the same, except they offer movies that are no longer in theaters, but still have not come to on-demand streaming. TVOD is usually slightly cheaper and allows for digital rentals as well as purchases.

PVOD and TVOD services are also key to studios, as they essentially allow movie producers to shake the last few drops of meaningful money from a movie before putting it on their streaming services. But if a movie is doing well on one of these platforms, it can mean studios decide to delay the film’s streaming release even longer.

All of this can add up to a very confusing set of variables for viewers to try and parse. Even for those of us who follow these types of releases closely, it can be difficult to nail down high-profile streaming debuts. Last year, for example, it seemed that Universal had fallen into a predictable cycle of shifting movies to Peacock 49 days after their initial release in theaters, which allowed me to correctly predict the exact day that the Austn Butler and Tom Hardy film “The Bikeriders” would arrive on NBCUniversal’s flagship streamer.

However, just when I was feeling at my most confident, Universal threw me for a loop. “Despicable Me 4” took nearly three weeks longer to reach Peacock than I thought it would, showing that release windows can be really tough to nail down even for someone who tries their hand at it weekly. For the average moviegoer who just wants to figure out which films need to be seen in theaters and which they can wait a little while for, it’s a nearly impossible task.

It’s not that studios are intentionally trying to confuse audiences with their difficult-to-decipher release windows. Each production house clearly has its own proprietary formula for determining theatrical and PVOD or TVOD windows, and typical corporate logic says that sharing those formulas risks giving other studios an advantage in the marketplace. Ultimately, how long a movie will take to reach streaming services is mostly about money, and since it’s difficult to predict how much a given movie will make until it’s actually released, studios will continue to use irregular release windows for their films.