Indian filmmakers and theater owners settled a two-month dispute about the sharing of ticket revenue Friday, paving the way for new Hindi movie releases beginning next week, industry officials said. Producers and distributors had held back new movies from multiscreen theater companies since early April, demanding an equal share of revenue from ticket sales. The theater owners said a 50-50 revenue split was unacceptable, given that many Hindi-language films do poorly at the box office. Until the strike, revenue-sharing arrangements had been negotiated movie by movie. Under the deal struck Friday, film producers are to get half of the revenue for the first week of releases and a smaller share for each subsequent week: 42 percent for the second week, 37 for the third and 32 for the fourth. Distributors and producers will earn bonuses for films that do exceptionally well but will have to pay rebates for movies that do very poorly. 'Basically it's a win for all,' said Amit Khanna, chairman of Reliance Entertainment, a big production house that also owns a cinema company. Khanna's company plans to release a film as early as next week: 'Kal Kisne Dekha,' which means 'Who Knows What Will Happen Tomorrow.' Deepak Asher, president of the Multiplex Association of India and a director of INOX Leisure, a theater chain, said the theaters were ready to get back to business. 'All of us are happy about the deal,' Asher said. Under the previous movie-by-movie negotiation system, producers and distributors said that they often got less than 50 percent of revenue and that theater owners would collectively dictate terms to distributors. The theater owners denied that they had colluded and said producers and distributors often received the majority of revenue from successful movies. Distributors and theater owners will now have to figure out how to release the backlog of movies that were delayed because of the strike. On Friday, some production companies started announcing release dates for their coming movies. During the strike, both sides probably suffered significant losses -- especially in May, a month when many schools are closed before the monsoons. There was a steep drop in box-office revenue in April to 260 million rupees ($5.5 million) from 1.1 billion rupees in the same month a year earlier, according to IBOS, a film-industry news service. April box-office sales were also probably hurt by the second season of the Indian Premier League cricket tournament. Data for May was not available. The strike primarily affected Hindi-language films, which are watched throughout the country but are most popular in the north. Films made in other languages experienced a slight lift at the box office because of the reduced competition. Although the strike was directed at multiple-screen theaters, producers and distributors did not release many movies in older, single-screen cinemas that can still be found across India. One historic theater, the Regal Cinema in south Mumbai near the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower hotel, was temporarily closed last month because of the strike. 