The first run is where a film meets its audience.
Every cinema release begins with a first run — the opening window where booking agreements, territories, box office and film rental all have to line up. First Run is a guide to how that world works, and the technology modernising it.
What happens behind a release
A theatrical release looks simple from the auditorium. Behind it sits some of the most intricate operational work in the film industry.
Booking agreements
Every screen showing a film does so under a release and booking agreement — negotiated per title, per site, often per territory, and tracked across hundreds of cinemas at once.
Multi-territory releases
Modern distributors rarely release into a single market. Cross-border campaigns mean parallel agreements, currencies, and reporting rules that all have to reconcile.
Box office data
Grosses flow back from exhibitors and box office aggregation platforms daily. Turning that raw data into settled numbers is where distribution teams lose their weeks.
Film rental & invoicing
The distributor's share of the box office — film rental — has to be calculated per agreement and invoiced to each exhibitor. Historically manual, and historically painful.
The end of legacy distribution systems
For decades this work ran on spreadsheets and ageing legacy platforms. That's changing: Unique X — the cinema technology company behind software supporting over 40,000 screens in more than 100 countries — has launched First Run, a cloud-native command centre for theatrical distribution. Nordisk Film Distribution is already running its sales across four countries on it.
Read about First Run