I’ve only noticed this happening now but it’s too little too late, my local theater had a showing of the original Twister when Twisters was a month away, and currently they’re doing a showing of the original Karate Kid and the original 28 Days Later in anticipation for the sequels later this year.
But there’s a ton of movies where this doesn’t happen, which is weird because sometimes I like to go see a previous movie in anticipation of a sequel in the theater, and I’d go see it in theaters if I could. And I don’t think this is a rare phenomenon because when I saw the original Twister airing the movie theater was packed and a lot of people were talking before the movie about how they were seeing this because they were also going to see Twisters later.
I suspect it depends on where you live. There are frequently such showings of older films, including ones whose sequel is opening soon, where I live. There are 49 movie theaters in the Washington, D.C. area. This doesn’t include some theaters only occasionally used to show films. If I were to include the Baltimore area, there are even more of them. There are even more if you include some others a little further away but still within driving distance.
They used to do this, way back when. I got to see most of the James Bond movies on reruns in the theaters before now ones came out (this was before VCRs and before they started broadcasting them on TV). Saw a lot of older movies that way.
Nowadays they usually run the earlier movies of the franchise on cable channels or maybe streaming. I know that before a sequel comes out I can coiunt on seing it listed several times on my channel guide.
This is likely the answer. I suspect for most films, other than the very biggest FX extravaganzas, and/or highly-anticipated sequels, most people who would want to see the earlier film(s) before going to see the new sequel in the theater are going to be more interested in being able to watch the older films at home.
Back when Goldfinger was released, it did so well that many theaters followed it up with a double-feature re-release of Dr. No and From Russia with Love (two earlier films in the series). The strategy behind movie releases and theater bookings used to be a lot different. For example, we used to expect matinees to be different movies from the evening showings in single-screen theaters.
Warner Brothers owns TNT
Paramount owns Showtime
Disney owns FX
NBC Universal owns Peacock
Etc., Etc.
Why bother to re-release a blockbuster film through a bunch of independent theater chains when you can run it on your own network, generate audiences and revenue, while helping to fill the cavernous maw for content a cable network or streaming service needs.
This is what I was talking about above where I said that I saw almost all of the Bond films as re-releases , although it was a later vintage of re-releases than the time of Goldfinger. They did this again later on with other Bond films.
One technical question: Most cinemas have (as far as I know) changed to digital projectors and receive the movies as a digital package.
Do movie distributors have digitized all of their backlist, or are some older movies that get little play in cinemas only available as classic film copies?
If a movie is still being shown on TV or streaming services, I’m fairly positive that it has been digitized at this point, as I think that those channels and services exclusively work with digital copies of pretty much everything now.
Cable/streaming TV has taken care of that. As an example, I watched IMF 7 part one, “Dead Reckoning”, just a week ago on TV. It set up “Dead Reckoning part two”, also referred to as “Final Reckoning” which is coming out this weekend in the theaters.