5 TV Shows That Played in Movie Theaters (& Made Bank)

It was recently announced that Crave’s smash-hit LGBTQ+ hockey romance series Heated Rivalry will be playing in U.S. theaters throughout November in three two-episode packages. While this might seem like an unusual move (because it is), it’s not unprecedented. This isn’t the first time that a small screen title has broken through to the big screen through sheer popularity.

While it remains to be seen if this will be your typical quiet boutique release or if it will rake in the big bucks, these five previous television projects that played in theaters have proven the viability of this type of release strategy by pulling in solid numbers in theaters.

The Amazing Spider-Man

No, not the Andrew Garfield movie. Long before Garfield, Tom Holland, or even Tobey Maguire stepped into the role of Spider-Man, the iconic Marvel comic book character first appeared on the big screen thanks to the 1977 television show The Amazing Spider-Man, which starred Nicholas Hammond (Friedrich von Trapp from The Sound of Music) in the title role as the web-slinging superhero.

The TV movie pilot for the series premiered in overseas theaters in 1977 under the title Spider-Man and ended up grossing $9 million. That’s $49 million when adjusted for inflation, which is more than the worldwide grosses of the 2026 movies Return to Silent Hill ($47.5 million), Young Washington ($47.1 million), Hope ($46.8 million), and Greenland 2: Migration ($45.2 million). It was such a success that other specials from the two-season series were repackaged for overseas theatrical distribution as 1978’s Spider-Man Strikes Back and 1981’s Spider-Man: The Dragon's Challenge.

Battlestar Galactica

The TV movie pilot episode of the landmark 1978 science fiction series Battlestar Galactica similarly got repackaged as a theatrical release. The film, which was also released under the alternate title Saga of a Star World, was run in theaters in Canada (then later the United States and international markets) in an attempt to find a way to help turn a profit off the TV movie’s exorbitant costs of $8 million.

Releasing this into the post-1977 Star Wars marketplace very much worked in the show’s favor, as the theatrical release ultimately earned more than $41 million. When adjusted for inflation, the movie far outstrips 1977’s Spider-Man with roughly $200 million! If it had come out in 2026, it would currently be the 26th highest-grossing movie of the year, ahead of titles including Insidious: Out of the Further ($170.3 million), Verity ($146.5 million), The Drama ($134.7 million), and The Sheep Detectives ($133.1 million).

While Battlestar Galactica itself only lasted one season due to mounting production costs, it launched a long-running franchise that now includes four television series, as well as two additional theatrical releases, namely Mission Galactica: The Cylon Attack (which packaged other episodes of the original series) and Conquest of the Earth (which featured episodes from the first spinoff, Galactica 1980).

Game of Thrones

At a certain point, HBO’s fantasy megahit Game of Thrones got so big that they could put it anywhere they darn well pleased, and money would come flowing in. This was underscored when they released the final two episodes of season 4 in IMAX theaters in January 2015. Even though this was a newbie-proof set of episodes that were put into theaters six full months after they had originally aired, the release grossed $1.9 million over the course of a single week on 205 screens.

During its opening weekend, it earned a per-screen average of $7,317, which was the second-best debut PSA of the entire month for a movie that opened on more than 20 screens at the domestic box office. While it fell behind the anticipated action sequel Taken 3 ($10,907), it managed to squash The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death ($5,775), The Wedding Ringer ($6,876), Paddington ($5,742), The Boy Next Door ($5,730), Strange Magic ($1,822), Mortdecai ($1,586), and Project Almanac ($2,782).

The Chosen

Angel Studios’ faith-based series The Chosen, which is set in the first century and follows the life of Jesus Christ, first dipped its toes into theaters with the 2021 Christmas special Christmas with the Chosen: The Messengers. That release debuted at No. 4 at the domestic box office and ultimately grossed $13.4 million, which is more than several major movies that year made at the domestic box office, including James Wan’s Malignant ($13.3 million), the Tom Holland young adult adaptation Chaos Walking ($13.3 million), and Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel ($10.8 million).

The show has continued to galvanize faith-based releases by putting multi-episode packages from seasons 3, 4, and 5 into theaters. Across eight releases, The Chosen has made a whopping $107.9 million in North America, peaking with the $23.9 million gross of 2025’s The Chosen: Last Supper - Part 1, which debuted at No. 3 ahead of fellow new releases The Woman in the Yard and Death of a Unicorn, with a higher per-screen average than the weekend’s No. 1 debut, the Jason Statham action movie A Working Man ($5,287 vs. $4,754).

Stranger Things

Netflix’s 1980s-set sci-fi fantasy series Stranger Things is one of the biggest television phenomena of the modern age. In addition to racking up huge streaming numbers, it helped make 1980s nostalgia a bustling industry for many years. When it came time for the show to finally bid farewell on December 31, 2026, it made sense for that momentous occasion to be screened in theaters in addition to streaming.

While the Stranger Things finale technically didn’t earn money at the box office due to stipulations in the cast’s contracts, the workaround that Netflix used was to sell “concessions vouchers” to the tune of $25 million in 620 theaters. Movies that earned less than $25 million that year at the actual domestic box office, in spite of playing for longer and in more theaters, included M3GAN 2.0 ($24.1 million), Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere ($22.6 million), Wolf Man ($20.7 million), and Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing ($19 million).

All this, and it didn’t prevent Stranger Things season 5 from becoming the fourth most-watched English-language TV season in history on Netflix, with more than 1.4 billion hours viewed.

Are there any shows that you think are cinematic enough to earn a run in theaters? Share your thoughts in the comments below!