Nope. It's a revenue share. The studio gets a percentage of the ticket price. That percentage lowers across time, but few modern movies last long enough for theaters to benefit from that. Studios also lay down all sorts of conditions on top of that, which is why you'll sometimes see notices prohibiting the use of coupons etc.
Theaters are audited on a fairly routine basis. The real penalty is a blacklist for blockbusters, which in turn affects your ability to draw a crowd and sell concessions. The screening industry is basically a studio shakedown, which is one of the reasons why the kind of mom and pop theaters you saw Raiders of the Lost Ark in don't exist anymore.
I managed a large theater in Anchorage for a few years about 10 years ago and it basically breaks down like this:
Tickets: Basically you have regional and national buyers for the movie chain, you "lease" the film from the studios for a %, usually the first few weeks of a release the theater may get .25 a ticket, if the film is there for more than a few weeks the % increase but it is all negotiated before hand and a lot of movies are negotiated depended on where its playing, the size of poplulation and the surronding theaters and how many seats they have. So in theory a large chain like regal may get a better % than a small chain like Ritz (small chain in the Phildelphia area). So really theaters make minimal money on the movies themseleves, unless its there for a long time. I remember Matrix made a decent amound towards the end since it was in the theater for a long time.
Concessions: It all boils down to the magic PerCap (average amount spent by a patron per day), its a break down of concession sales per customer per day and is averaged out over the course of weeks, months and years, the higher your PerCap is the more money your theater makes, the more money it can pay it's employees, the better services it has, the quicker seats, screens and projectors get repaired, etc... At the theater I managed, you didn't actually pay for the popcorn or the sode, you paid for the cup or the bag, those were the invnetoried items and if a bag broke, ripped, we had to write it down and write it off as a loss everyday. We got 50lbs of corn in weekly and the true cost of a bag of corn was about .10 for a small bag including butter (we used the real stuff melted). The bag itself though when we get invoiced from the home office was quite a bit higher.
Working at a theater for a while is a fun thing to do but as a career, not sure I could recommend it, at the chain I worked for the you went to their management school, could be placed anywhere in the country and the pay really wasn't that great. As a co-manager (my title) I was a step below and the only decent benefit it had was a salary and medical.
I knew the all the small theater owners in the state (only a few at the time, Alaska is only so big) and they were always looking to sell because they couldn't make money.
Funny story and I will leave out the names but I knew another manager at one of the other national chain theaters in town, was a really swell guy and their theater was the oldest around but did horrible sales, no one ever went there unless it was a major opening and they had a huge main screen but the theater was in bad shape. He had been there for 10+ years and one day he just left and quit. National management came in to change things around and looked in safe and found over 15K in IOU's.... don't think they ever found the guy.
