The primary owner of a movie is the distribution house that doles out rights to the movie. Since producing movie is such an involved, multidisciplinary process, many people often take creative ownership of the project.
There are four major formats in which movies are currently distributed: theater format, cable/satellite/broadcast format, rentable format, and purchasable format. In all formats except purchasable, the buyer owns the movie for only a limited, well-defined, period of time. When a consumer purchases a movie, they own it and are allowed to view it whenever they want. They are not however, allowed to distribute or display the movie to a large audience.