What Theatrical Tracking Can Tell Us About Streaming Success

I suggest you take a seat because I’m about to drop some shocking knowledge: movies that perform well in theaters tend to perform well in later windows too. Mind blown, right? Sarcasm aside, accurately projecting film performance earlier in the process has never been more important. We live in an era of compressed theatrical exclusivity, robust PVOD and TVOD markets, and 10-figure Pay-One streaming deals for theatrical releases. Studios need to maximize earnings potential in each window, while streamers carefully program around projected performance. (And strong results let studios charge more in future licensing deals.)

Pre-release theatrical tracking signals can help forecast long-tail engagement. Greenlight Analytics’ Willingness to Pay (WTP) metric — representing the percent of respondents who would pay to see a film in theaters, via PVOD/TVOD, or by subscribing to a streaming service to watch — shows a measurable relationship to Nielsen’s streaming minutes across top 2023–2025 theatrical titles.

Every theatrically released movie during that span that landed among Nielsen’s top 10 most-streamed films scored at least 51% WTP (Encanto, Paw Patrol: The Movie) and as high as 75% (Moana 2) in its debut week. Each went on to generate several billion minutes of U.S. TV-set viewership. For comparison, recent titles such as A24’s The Smashing Machine (44%), Disney’s Tron: Ares (46%), and Paramount’s Roofman (48%) didn’t hit those same WTP levels.

Across 20 top-streaming films from 2023–2025, the overall correlation between Willingness to Pay and total streaming viewership is modest when isolating only the streaming window (unfortunately, studios rarely release PVOD/TVOD data). But family and animated titles — along with major cinematic events like Black Panther: Wakanda Forever — still convert strong pre-release intent into repeat streaming performance. (Wakanda Forever earned a 73% WTP score at release, grossed $454 million domestically, and later generated more than six billion streaming minutes on Disney+).

In practical terms, audiences that harbor an intent to pay often drive enduring engagement after release. Long waterfalls of value and all that. That makes WTP a valuable forward-looking telescope metric bridging audience spending intent with long-tail viewership. Studios can better anticipate how titles will perform across monetization windows, and streamers can more accurately value theatrical licensing deals. 

If only it could tell me next week’s lottery numbers.