TV buys them from people who make them.
Paramount made the Movie so there's no real money coming in from them. One division coukd pay another I suppose but Paramount paying Paramount hmmn.
There's first click metric and VoD. Even in Covid times VoD only got a small % cinema releases were hauling in. It's only gonna help out if the numbers were unclear/close.
There's no back end deal here for streaming rights. Paramount nay have paid Hasbro but no ones paying them to stream the movie.
They need to produce content for their VoD anyway. So they would have paid 100 Millionen for their Streaming Service for another production or for this.
And for Paramount+ ... what they have now, also with their D&D series, is, that they are the only place to have good D&D Movie/Film content (if you ignore Critical Role on Amazon).
It is a selling point.
Paramount+ has at the moment only one franchise, that I would pay for to see, that's Star Trek. Now they get a second franchise, D&D. And when the D&D series comes out, I will probably get Paramount+.
For the movie alone not so much, but I will get that on Bluray to get all the Behind the Scene stuff of the movie.
Having the D&D IP on paramount+ is good for Paramount.
Bad for everybody else who just want one service where all content is, but good for Paramount.
Will it pay off?
Maybe.
If they get 10 million subscribers who just get Paramount+ for their D&D content, that's 1 200 million $ per year. If they soend 600 million on D&D content, that's a big win.