Block Booking
Block booking, outlawed by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1948, is a system whereby film distributions companies sell multiple films to a movie theater as a package deal. Under this system, “independent theater owners were forced to take large numbers of [a] studio’s picture sight unseen. Those studios could then parcel out second rate products along with A-class features and star vehicles, which made both production and distribution more economical.” This system denied the owners of unaffiliated theaters the right to reject films on the grounds that they had to “take them all or have none.” Studio executives and film producers benefitted from this practice as it provided them with the security of knowing that even their smaller films would be provided a place of exhibition so long as they had other, more “desirable” pictures to sell.
The commodification of motion pictures goes back to the early years of film production. The nickelodeon was a prototypical form of film exhibition by which films would be projected in familiar spaces such as storefronts and audiences would be charged a small fee in order to access this new form of entertainment. By the mid-1920s, film production and distribution companies had formed an oligopoly, in effect consolidating control over a large percent of what films were made and where they would go thereafter. “The Big Five” of the early studio system is considered to be 20th Century Fox, Metro-Goldwyn Mayer, RKO Pictures, Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros while the “Little Three” refer to Universal Pictures, Columbia Pictures and United Artists. If a film was being screened in an American movie theatre during the second quarter of the 20th century, there was a high chance it was produced by or distributed by (in many cases, both) one of these companies. Hollywood was almost completely vertically integrated by the 1940s.
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