Exhibition

FILM EXHIBITION AFTER TELEVISION

The World War II years, with a fully employed work-force, marked a high point in the film exhibition business in the United States. Weekly attendance topped 80 million annually from 1943 to 1946. Exhibitors not only sold a record number of tickets, but reinforced their civic role through public service gestures: selling government war bonds and staging drives to collect rubber, scrap metal, and other material needed for the war effort. Yet between 1946 and 1953, ticket sales in the United States dropped by almost 50 percent. By 1960, weekly attendance at the movies was only 30 million, dipping further, to 18 million, by 1970.

If the Paramount case seemed to assure greater latitude for theater owners, Hollywood's mid-1950s commitment to color and wide-screen processes (like Cinemascope) meant that exhibitors were strongly encouraged to invest in another costly technological upgrading of projectors, screens, and sound equipment. At the same time, the film audience through the 1950s and 1960s became progressively younger and more male than had previously been the case. Drive-ins came to form a key part of the larger exhibition market, even as the industry suffered continuing effects from the rise of commercial television as a readily available source of entertainment in the home.

Television, however, quickly became another outlet, or exhibition window, for Hollywood films, as studio film libraries were sold or rented to TV stations, with RKO leading the way in 1954. By the mid-1960s it was commonplace for new films to move relatively quickly to prime time television after they had completed their theatrical runs. Even with poor quality sound, panned-and-scanned images (that is, wide-screen films cropped to fit the dimensions of the TV screen), and commercial interruptions, movies drew large audiences on American network television. By the end of the 1960s the precedent had been firmly set for later developments of the television set as "home [movie] theater." With the emergence and widespread diffusion of cable and satellite networks, videocassettes, and DVDs, watching movies no longer necessarily meant going to the movies. One result was that the second- and third-run theaters that had been so important during the first half of the twentieth century disappeared, leaving the theatrical exhibition business overwhelmingly dependent on first-run venues.

As theatrical exhibition shrank, the movie theater changed as well, partly in response to the Paramount decision. Multiplex cinemas, first situated in shopping centers, then in shopping malls, became the core of the business by the 1970s. New theater chains emerged, like General Cinema, which began with a handful of drive-ins and ultimately grew to more than 200 venues, mostly shopping mall multiplexes. American Multi-Cinema, which pioneered the multiplex concept in Kansas City in 1963, refined this particular exhibition model as the company opened increasingly larger multiplexes. By 1980 American Multi-Cinema's 130 theaters across the United States contained some 700 screens. That year attendance stood at 20 million weekly. (It would rise to 25 million by 1995 and to 30 million by 2002.) The spread of the multiplex meant that film exhibition increasingly became a matter of scheduling nationally advertised, widely available, first-run films with little regard for the particularities of locality or audience.

The exhibition business went through another round of significant changes during the mid-1980s, when the Reagan administration encouraged a return to the pre-1948 era by allowing a much greater corporate consolidation of production, distribution, and exhibition. Entertainment companies quickly sought to create vertical monopolies that included the ownership of theaters, as well as new exhibition windows like satellite television. At the same time, corporate mergers and takeovers meant that fewer companies came to control a greater number of screens, with much investment in free-standing megaplex theaters, not only in suburbs but also in metropolitan areas.

From the late 1970s on, exhibition also changed because wider release patterns for first-run films—called "saturation booking"—increasingly became the norm after the success of films like Jaws (1975). This move was prompted by the high cost of film production, the drop in the number of major studio releases, the need for distributors to pre-sell as-yet-uncompleted films to exhibitors (a form of blind booking), and the reliance on television as the prime advertising medium for new films. Not only did distributors aim toward saturating the market by making new films simultaneously available on a thousand or more screens, but they also insisted that new releases be given extended theatrical runs, moving from larger to smaller auditoria inside the same multi-screen theater. Thus while newly designed, high-quality theater complexes with eight or more screens held out the possibility that moviegoers might choose among a more diverse array of films, this was, in practice, rarely the case.