In the days before TV or revival theaters if you didn’t see a movie when it came out you weren’t going to. The only exception was if a movie was so successful that the studio re-released it. Did the studios ever make a movie with the assumption that they would be making money from it over the years? Gone With the Wind seems the most likely candidate. Or were all films considered ephemera, to be enjoyed for a few weeks and then existing only in memory and studio vaults, unless the box office decreed otherwise?
Generally not. And if you look at ads for movies in your local newspapers, you’ll see why; you’re most likely not to have heard of any of them (even if you’re a film buff).
It did happen, of course. The 39 Steps was one example: movie theaters who were on a shoestring could run it to make their rent. Charlie Chaplin rereleased some of his silent films with audio tracks. But it was too chancy to expect the film would make money in rerelease; if it worked, that was gravy, but you didn’t expect it. You could budget things, but it was only for the first run.
Most movies back then were made by a cast, crew, director and writers who were studio employees. They were done on the cheap and shown as second or third features. A greater percentage of people went to the movies back then, so you wanted to give them something new. Gone with the Wind was a roadshow type movie, with more publicity showing in better and bigger theaters for a longer time.
BTW, when I was a kid it was very rare for anyone to see a movie more than once. 2001 is the first example I can recall where this was not so. People like me watching it over and over was a big bonus for MGM.
Didn’t movies have much longer runs back in the day? Even the big name movies now seem to run for a month at most, then are on dvd a month after that. But I remember when E.T. came out in theaters in the 80’s and I’d swear it was in the theater for close to 6 months, or possibly longer. I know my mom and sister saw it in the theater 3 or 4 times over at least a 3 month period. How long did movies run in theaters during the classic era? Did they have some theaters that showed movies for longer periods than others, or did they all have roughly the same length movie runs? Were there any theaters that showed older movies?
You could count on Disney re-releasing any movie, animated or otherwise, every seven years or so, once another sub-generation of kids came along who hadn’t seen it last time.
But Disney was the exception; they were the first studio to really create a franchise around the name of the studio rather than characters (e.g. The Thin Man series, Charlie Chan, et cetera). And because their films were pretty timeless it was easy to plan on a rerelease program.
As others have noted, most films produced in the “Golden Age of Hollywood” (up to the mid-'Sixties) were made by major studios (e.g. the Big Five of MGM, 20th Century Fox, Paramount, RKO, Warner Brothers or the more diversified “Little Three” of Columbia, United Artists, and Universal) with studio contract players, directors, and writers, typically in studio owned stages and backlots, with costs and directorial authority very tightly controlled by the producer, who was also often a senior studio executive. The expensive on location shooting of the Bond franchise or elaborate sets like that used for Rear Window were the exception, and reviews were generally limited to a one or two paragraph blurb in the local paper by an uncritical reviewer. A studio could expect to make back their investment even on a modest turnout just because going to the movies was a regular part of American entertainment lifestyle whether the film was any good or not. Most films did have a run through second and even third run cinemas but that generates only a very small revenue stream (albeit one that, in the studio era, was relatively free of additional royalty payments or other costs). Hedging on a major re-release was unheard of until after Star Wars, when the films were rereleased with great fanfare to promote the sequel, often with revenues comparable to the original run (though most of the money on those films came from the marketing of toys and apparel rather than ticket sales).
Today, cinematic release of most mainstream films are loss-leaders for DVD/download/streaming revenue and merchandising, so studios are not as terribly concerned about getting good reviews or powerful opening weekend (despite the hype) than they are strong word-of-mouth and good licensing deals in place long before the film opens to the public. A shitty film like Stealth can generate enormous revenue for the studio even when it flops in theaters, and that failure can be used to shelter real earnings, whereas a modest success in theaters with little followthrough can be a significant loss for studios.
Stranger
I think there were movies theaters that showed older movies at discounted prices. The 1930s versions of “Frankenstein” and “Dracula” really became popular when they were re-released as a twinbill. In his mid 50s biography on his father “Life with Groucho”, Arthur Marx talks about how “A Night at the Opera” (1935) was still earning big money in the late 1940s.
I think in a thread a few years ago, someone noted that musicals did pretty well in the second run market 60 years ago.
It wouldn’t have been a smart strategy to count on making money from a re-release. No one knows for sure whether a movie will be a hit. There are many cases where a studio spent a huge amount of money on a movie only to have it bomb, and many other cases where a low-budget picture was highly successful. There are also cases where movies only became popular sometime after the initial release.
As for movie runs being longer in the old days - I’m not sure this is true of the classic era. Here are a couple of theater ads from 1944 showing the schedules for a couple of movie houses. They got new films every couple of days.
The entire structure of theaters was different in the studio system. First of all, the major studios owned theaters in all major cities (17% of all theaters, bringing in 42% of all revenue); these were the ones who got the A-picture releases – prestige films and the like.
Then there were independent theaters who ran first run films. Either they’d be the second-rank A pictures from the majors, or movies from the little three, which didn’t own that many theaters.
Next were the second run houses. They’d get the big movies a week or two after opening. They also played some B-pictures.
Finally there were the neighborhood theaters. Most of their audience came from within walking distance. They featured B-pictures and movies from the poverty row studios like Republic and Monogram.
The second run and neighborhood theaters were usually where there’d be double features and children’s matinees and would have multiple films in a week.
Programs were different, too. There was only one showing a day, and it included not only the feature, but newsreels, short subjects (some comedy, some dramatic), cartoons, and previews of coming attractions. The show ran about three hours and there was no need to look up showtimes – it was the same time each day (7 pm IIRC, but people didn’t show up at the beginning, so if dinner was late, they could go over and only catch one or two of the shorts*).
The neighborhood houses would occasionally run an old film, but they were more likely to show a newer picture.
*This carried over into the 60s; Hitchcock didn’t allow people to enter the theater after the first half hour of Psycho (so no one would wonder why Janet Leigh wasn’t in the movie).
Sigh…I miss Disney re-releases. There’s just something about seeing them on the big screen, surrounded by kids discovering them for the first time and adults on the same nostalgia trip you are. I know it’s not all that feasible given that many people now have them on DVD, but still…
It’s a shame the 3D re-releases didn’t pan out. The Lion King did well in 3D, but the others didn’t, and Finding Nemo was the last, with plans to 3Dify The Little Mermaid shelved. I was rather hoping they’d do the REALLY old classics in 3D, if only for a reason to see them in the theatre again. Just imagine Fantasia in 3D. More specifically, imagine the Night On Bald Mountain scene in 3D…(makes Homer Simpson drooling noise)
If it can’t be a general re-release, I’d at least like to see them try a few through Fathom Events. I would think that with this year being Fantasia’s 75th, they could give that one a shot.
It was well into the TV era but back when I was a Littler Nemo there was one not uncommon form of re-release - hit movies that were released during the winter sometimes got a second release in the summer for the drive-in trade.
I’m familiar with the old studio system and studio owned theaters, but I didn’t know that there were other theaters as well. If a movie was a surprise success could it be held over in the studio owned theaters, or did it always have to make way for the next movie? Could the second run houses show a movie for as long as there was interest, or were they contractually limited in some way?
I don’t know if any were made with the assumption that they’d get re-released (aside from Disney’s major films), but certainly the studios did capitalize on a hit by re-releasing it. King Kong was re-released multiple times through the 30s, 40, and into the 1950s, before it was released to television (and it still had re-releases to art houses after that, especially after the scenes cut to comply with the Hays code were rediscovered and put back in during the 1970s). Goldner and Turner, in The Making of King Kong, credit the film and its re-releases with saving the RKO studio.
Bela Lugosi, in an interview in the 1930s, said that “Dracula” was playing every week in a theater somewhere in the world. All the “Big” Universal monster films got re-releases, often on double bills.
Gone with the Wind, Wizard of Oz, other big films got multiple releases.
Heck, the practice continued through the 1970s. I saw most of the early Bond films on double-bill re-releases before home video became a reality (and the didn’t release the Bond films to TV until Goldfinger showed up on ABC TV in the 1970s
The first run theaters would hold over movies if they were packing in an audience. Studios would readjust their release schedule to fit it in.
Second run houses could hold over a film, too. They paid more than the smaller theaters, so the studios were happy to extend runs.
Neighborhood theaters usually didn’t, since they had a small audience that would want to see something new.
In the silent era, films had silver nitrate in the, and were generally melted down after their run, which is why so many films are lost. DW Griffith kept a library of his films, and that’s why so many of his have survived, and there were lots of people who collected films with popular stars of the time, which is why films with Mary Pickford and Lon Chaney survive. Someone bought a print from the studio for the price of the silver in it, basically. Every once in a while, a nearly complete print of a famous film, even one thought to be lost, turns up in an odd place, because a collector gave it to a friend, who moved to another country, and left it to his grandson, who stuck it in the attic. Most recently, a nearly complete print (which we know by comparing it to the screenplay) of Metropolis turned up in Argentina about five years ago.
Anyway, a lot of films that got saved did get saved in private collections, but studios hung onto anything that was a hit, and would often re-release shortened versions as part of a total bill. A typical bill in the 1930s and 40s consisted of a cartoon, a newsreel, a, installment in a serial, a short film or documentary, that was about 45 minutes long, and then the feature, which was usually 1:15 - 1:30. That’s why films were shorter back then. Anyway, there were short versions of Frankenstein and Dracula to show as short subjects before the sequels.
Old films were saved for another reason, and that was to use as stock footage. If someone bothered to lug cameras out to Nevada to film buffalo stampeding, for a Western that flops, the studio isn’t going to toss out the film. That buffalo footage is too valuable. So is any crowd footage that might have also been filmed.
Once television came along, all films were saved. Film stock itself had gotten a lot cheaper, and you never knew when some TV station needed to fill 90 minutes with something ready-made and cheap. The post office has a media rate, so even though films on reels are heavy, it only costs a few dollars to ship them. I used to mail back the 16mm prints we used where I worked in college, so I know what it cost.
I’m sure a lot of low-demand films are stored digitally now, and my never be shown on actual film if most of the demand is for TV & streaming (Netflix, etc.), and they can make a quick DVD print any time they want.
Theaters have probably always been able to broker a deal to show something from the ‘catalogue’. Probably a flat rate. (100 bucks) or a easy percentage (35%) of the gross.
When I owned and operated a movie theater in the 90s it was usually 100 -200 dollars vs. 35%, which ever was greater. The studios would have lists of titles you could get. (midnight movies, classic houses operate this way)
There used to be ‘film depots’ all over the country. Centralized locations where film would be shipped by the studio to there and then sent from there to various theaters. They usually hold some prints there rather then ship them back to the studio so that a print would be “nearby” for possible use. For instance there might be one print in Dallas for use in TX, and OK.
(or course digital distribution is closing these places)
Getting back to Disney: A lot of the classic animated movies didn’t break even until their third or fourth re-release. Considering how many of them they made, it would be kind of a shock if they didn’t factor that into their business plan. Some of the later ones, like The Jungle Book, The Aristocats and 101 Dalmatians sure looked like they were cutting corners and using less expensive techniques. (No cite available, since any estimate of any movie’s net profits prior to Coming to America involves some wild-ass guesswork. The examples chosen are rehashed by cocktail chatter with 80s-era film professors and after-the-fact animation insiders.)
Keep in mind that a lucrative way to make money off an older film that was successful is to remake it. People might not want to pay money in a theater for a 10 year old film, but the same movie with current stars can bring in quick cash.
This happened a remarkable number of times in the old studio days.
They’re still doing it. E.g., A Star Is Born has been made 3 times so far with a 4th in the works. We’re almost due for another Body Snatchers remake. Brrrr.