page_title: Double feature
section_title: Decline
hierarchical_section_title: Double feature / Decline
caption_attribution_description: Astor Theatre. St Kilda
context_page_description: The double feature was a motion picture industry phenomenon in which theatres would exhibit two films for the price of one, supplanting an earlier format in which one feature film and various short subject reels would be shown.
context_section_description: The double feature arose partly because of a studio practice known as "block booking," a form of tying in which major Hollywood studios required theaters to buy B-movies along with the more desirable A-movies. The U.S. Supreme Court decided that this practice was illegal in United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. in 1948, contributing to the end of the studio system.
  Without block booking, the studios no longer had an incentive to make their own B features. But audiences at first run movie palaces, neighborhood theatres, 
  and drive-in theatres, still expected a program of two features. In 1948 nearly two thirds of the movie houses in the United States were advertising double features.
  Following the Supreme Court ruling of 1948, known as the Paramount Consent Decree, the source for the second feature changed. The second feature could be:
  a major studio re-release of an older feature,
  an older feature re-released from firms that specialised in acquiring and rereleasing older films such as Realart and Astor Pictures,
  a low budget feature contracted from a smaller studio.
  James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff formed American International Pictures in the mid 1950s to produce and distribute low budget features. Unfortunately they
  discovered exhibitors were only interested in buying their pictures as supporting features (a B movie) at a flat rate. Once Nicholson and Arkoff combined two features into a 
  program sold as a double bill, each picture given equal billing in the advertising and backed up with an explosive ad campaign, theaters were willing to exhibit on a percentage basis. 
  The exhibitors may have kept a larger share of the box office than the major distributors demanded. 
  But AIP's share of the box office was enough to keep it from going out of business.
  The double bill was sold on a percentage basis and each feature was given equal billing in newspaper adds and promotional materials. Since the trailers and advertising promoted the two titles, exhibitors were discouraged from separating the features in the package.  To distributors and exhibitors, it was a substantially different policy than the standard double feature in that it was not a top billed A feature combined with a minor billed support feature sold at a flat rate (a B movie).
  By the mid 1960s, double features had been mostly abandoned in non–drive-ins in favor of the modern single-feature screening, in which only one feature film is exhibited. However, double bills of popular series that had previously been run as a single feature such as the James Bond and Matt Helm superspy genre and The Man With No Name and The Stranger spaghetti westerns were re-released together by the main studios.
  The end of the first run double feature also saw the end of continuous screenings, an exhibition policy where a theater opened at 10:30 or 11am and ran the program without breaks until midnight. Customers bought tickets and entered the theater at anytime during the program. 
  While most cinemas have discontinued the practice of showing the double feature, it has nostalgia appeal. The Astor Theatre in St Kilda, Melbourne, Australia, established in 1936, continues the tradition of the double feature to this day.
  Short films still occasionally precede the feature presentation (Pixar films generally feature a short, for example), but the double feature is now effectively extinct in first-run movie theaters in the U.S.
  Following the success of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, three Roger Rabbit cartoon shorts were created to be shown as preludes to other Disney films, in an effort to revive the viewing of cartoon shorts before major films. Only three were made and the scheme failed.
  Many repertory houses continue to show two films, usually related in some way, back to back.
  During the 1990s, many VHS cassettes that showed two films on the same tape (the second was often a sequel to the first film) were self-named as "double features."
  In 2007, filmmakers Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez released their individual films Planet Terror and Death Proof as a double feature under th
caption: The Astor Theatre in Melbourne, Australia has shown double features since its opening in 1936.
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