House nut (house allowance)

The house nut belongs to one deal structure in particular: the "90/10 over the house nut" arrangement. Box office first covers the cinema's agreed weekly expenses — the nut — and whatever is left is split, historically ninety per cent to the distributor and ten to the exhibitor. The distributor's share is then compared against a percentage-of-gross floor, and the cinema pays whichever is higher.

So the nut is not what the building actually costs. It is a negotiated number, set per cinema and reviewed from time to time, that stands in for those costs in the rental calculation.

Most film rental today is calculated as a straight percentage of box office that declines over the run, and the house nut plays no part in that. The term survives in older contracts, in some territories and in the vocabulary of experienced bookers — and in software, where a cinema's settlement module may still carry a house-allowance field nobody has used in years.

It is still worth understanding because it explains the logic behind the modern deals: the distributor is entitled to most of what a film earns once the cinema's costs of showing it are covered. Everything since has been a simpler way of approximating that.