Usually, the movie's distributor gets more than half of the money earned. The rest is kept by the movie theater. The percentage is different from movie to movie. The distributor often gets a higher percentage in early weeks. As time passes, the percentage become lower and the theater keeps a larger part of the ticket sales. With some movies, the distributor may take all of the ticket sales for the first week. The theater earns its money by selling food and drinks. After several weeks nearly all of the ticket sales is kept by the theater. Because of this, only the first few weeks are very important to the movie studios. 