how long did movies play in the movie theaters in the 1950s?
please answer, thanks!
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If memory serves me they might run a couple of weeks in the big cities. In smaller towns like where I lived they would usually run 2 days.
shareThank you very much for your response! It really helps me out :)
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Are you sure about that wtl471629? I remember reading that if a movie was very successful, it could run for years since there was no videocasette or cable and TV was in its infancy, so in theaters was the only way people could watch movies.
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I know that's true, I have an old newspaper ad of The Sound of Music that shows the theatre it is playing at and it says 'Now in it's 2nd year!'.
shareThe first reply to this question was correct for films of that era. If a film was a big hit,
it would be "Held over" for another week, maybe 2 weeks. Really big studio films would have
the glamorous premieres in New York and Hollywood and then slowly spread out to local theaters
and then to smaller markets so the films might be in circulation for months.
The Sound of Music(1965) was a road show attraction which was common in the 1920's,
but ended in the 1930s (except for Gone With The Wind"). Road show presentations, where a film
played at only one theater in major cities for months (or years, as in The Sound of Music)
was revived in the 1950's. The first was This is Cinerama, in 1952. In this case, there were only a handful of theaters capable of projecting this format and it grossed over
$10 million in only 5 theaters.(This is over $100 million in today's dollars.)
The Ten Commandments spent 18 months at the Criterion Theater in New York, and there were similar one theater runs for such epics as Ben-Hur,
Spartacus, musicals such as South Pacific and yes, The Sound of Music did run for over
2 years at the Rivoli in New York and elsewhere. Almost all of these lengthy engagements
required reserved seating just like live theater.
I lived through that era and loved watching the these big films (many in 70mm) on huge screens
in those last remaining movie palaces.
This was in the 70s but I thought it may have been of some interest anyway.
A cinema called the Westgate famously ran Harold and Maude for about 2 years - 115 weeks, 1,957 screenings - and that was a single-screen cinema! More reading on the 3rd page of this .pdf http://www.edinahistoricalsociety.org/uploads/2/0/2/1/2021990/westgate_newsletter.pdf
I hope they used various prints throughout that time or by the end, the film would probably have been unwatchable!
I would imagine that as long as there was big money being made at the box office the movie stayed.
Back in the 50's only one channel aired movies I think and that was called Million Dollar Movies and they were movies that were at least 10 years old. So the only place to see blockbuster movies was at the movie theater.
I wonder how long it took to even have blockbusters come to tv, probably years.
No PPV, no DVD's back then.