It's a little more complicated than that. Film bookings are almost always on a percentage-of-the-gross basis these days, and the agreements include a few different negotiated terms.

First of all, the distributor and the cinema agree on the length of the engagement. Say for sake of argument, it's going to be four weeks.

Next, the cinema decides (knows well in advance, actually) what their fixed minimum cost per week is. Because that's a mouthful, this is usually called the nut. This varies wildly from house to house, because wrapped up in it is the cost of the lease on the venue itself. The Arclight Hollywood's nut is a lot higher than the nut for a multiplex five miles outside of Odessa, Texas. Let's just pick a number and say that the nut is gonna be $5,000 per week.

At this point, the cinema and the distributor have agreed that the cinema gets to show the film for four weeks, and that the cinema gets to keep the first $5,000 earned per week by that film.

Next come the percentages. The first is the net percentage, and it's usually graduated. For instance, it might be 95% for the first week, 90% for the second and third weeks and 85% for the fourth week. That means that if the film earns the cinema $10,000 the first week (just to pick a round number), then the nut is deducted and given to the house leaving $5,000 net, and the distributor gets 95% of that, or $4,750, leaving $250 for the house.

However, there's also a negotiated gross percentage. Maybe it's 75% for the first week, 65% for weeks to and three and 55% for week four. The net and gross percentages operate on a "whichever is greater" basis. So for the first week, the gross percentage would be 75% of the gross takings ($10,000) or $7,500. That's greater than $4,750, which means the distributor gets the bigger amount, leaving the house only $2,500, which is half what it cost to show the film in the first place. So the cinema loses money the first week.

But in subsequent weeks the percentages go down, and ideally the percentages go down faster than the gross revenues do, so the cinema should make its money back later in the run. That's the principle of the thing. Most of the time it works; that's how cinemas stay in business. That's why "sleeper hits" are such great boons for cinemas: movies that stay popular week after week get "held over" — the engagements are renegotiated — and cinemas make good profits showing them. But box-office bombs absolutely kill the cinemas, way worse than they hurt the companies that make them or the distributors who distribute them. Empty theaters are death.