The Wall Street Journal reports that The Interview has been streamed 2 million times and has reached $15 million in streaming sales. They didn’t give numbers on purchases versus rentals, but since we know that the purchase price is $15 and the rental price is $6 some quick math gives us the following breakdown:

  • 333,000 purchases ($5,000,000)

  • 1,666,000 rentals ($10,000,000)

People seem almost 5x as likely to rent versus buy, and rentals are both higher in volume and in revenue. This is in comparison to the nearly $3 million in theater sales. 

Now, for streaming versus theaters. Assuming $12 per theater ticket, the streams are equivalent to 1.25 million tickets sold. Assuming an average of 2 people watching each stream, that’s 4 million people who have paid to stream The Interview. That’s a lot of extra people for the same revenue. On the other hand, I watched it on my flight back from Minnesota to San Francisco (downloaded from Google Play), and I definitely wouldn’t have seen it in the theater. I wonder if we’ll get studios and actors claiming that streaming devalues movies like some artists claim it does for music.