Block booking

Block booking was the prevailing practice in the Hollywood studio system from the turn of the 1930s until it was outlawed by the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. (1948).

In a 1918 popularity poll ... the six top stars on the list—Mary Pickford, Marguerite Clark, Douglas Fairbanks, Harold Lockwood, William S. Hart, and Wallace Reid—were all under contract to Zukor.

Using this leverage, Paramount was able to insist that prospective exhibitors interested in, say, the Pickford films, acquire them in large blocks along with a quantity of less attractive titles.

[5] With Hollywood's conversion to sound film in the late 1920s, block booking increasingly became standard practice: in order to get access to a studio's attractive A pictures, many theaters were obliged to rent the company's entire output for a season.

This was also called "blind bidding" because, other than knowing the genre, the actors and actresses, and a brief overview of the plot, the exhibitors knew nothing about the films they were acquiring.

[10] The smaller Hollywood studios—known collectively as Poverty Row—did not have the big pictures with A-list stars that would have allowed them to compel theater owners to directly block book.

The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 controlled the interstate commerce with different trust-busting provisions and were brought to bear against studio system monopolistic activities.

Appeals were filed and the studios were able to prevent charges from being followed through until 1929, due to the collapse of the stock market and the Great Depression happening at the same time, making this issue moot.

On October 29, 1940, the Big Five studios (Loews/MGM, Paramount, 20th Century-Fox, Warner Bros.–First National, and RKO—the majors that owned large theater chains) signed a consent decree in an attempt to settle the case.

In its 1948 decision, the Supreme Court ordered the elimination of block booking and demanded a separation of theater holdings from production and distribution.