Film Distribution in the United States: Rights, Royalties, and Windows

The United States is the largest and most operationally complex film distribution market in the world. A single title released in the US can carry a five-studio competitive context, a 45-day theatrical window, a sub-licensed PVOD pipeline, three concurrent SVOD bidders, and a FAST tail that opens 18 months later. Every line in that sequence is a separate rights obligation, a separate revenue stream, and a separate compliance surface. Molten Cloud, the rights, royalties, and content management platform for film and television distributors, treats the US as the anchor territory in its avails engine — every other market's window math is priced against the US baseline. This guide is the operating picture for international distributors entering the US, and for US distributors who want one clean source of truth across all eight stages of a domestic release.