Gross Misunderstanding – Forget about the box office. By Edward Jay Epstein is a good article about the revenue stream for movies, showing how 80% of a film’s profits don’t come from the theater. That’s why movies are on DVD so quickly these days; the movie advertising and movie’s showing in the theaters are both really just promotions for the DVD. If a movie opened on DVD a year later, people will have forgotten about it by then. (And these days they’d have already gotten a pirated copy off the Internet.)