Film Spam: How movie studios dominated the industry

Classical Hollywood is often referred to as the Golden Age of Cinema. A number of classic films that are still highly regarded today were produced during that time period. The problem with this "Golden Age" was that for every one great film produced, there were dozens and dozens of terrible ones. The reasoning behind this was simple: in order to eliminate competition, they had to produce as many films as possible to fill up the theaters. This "block-booking" was the reason that the Big Five dominated the film industry at this time. The theaters would simply have no more room to play other films from independent filmmakers as an example.

Overall, this spam had a negative effect at the time on the cumulative quality of films, because the vast majority of movies were not carefully planned out and executed. You would have one or two great films a year, and then a slew of downright awful movies. At the time, this probably weakened the overall effectiveness of films. In recent years, however; we look back and see only the great ones, but nobody ever hears about the bad ones, which means that in the long run, this didn't actually hurt the studios that much.

But, alas, in 1948, the Supreme Court ruled that this practice of "block-booking" was anti-competitive, and placed restrictions on the studios. This didn't completely eliminate the practice, but it did stop the overwhelming spam that the studios kept creating, and led to the weakening of the studio system. An example of "block-booking", in 1977(not in the classic studio era, but the concept remains the same), there was this little film that was coming out, you may have heard of it:

Unfortunately, nobody wanted to show this film at their cinema. Luckily, thanks to this "huge blockbuster" called "The Other Side of Midnight" (which quite ironically was nowhere even close to Star Wars in box office totals), also made by 20th Century Fox, "Star Wars" actually got put into theaters. Fox told theaters that if they wanted to show "The Other Side of Midnight", they had to show "Star Wars". This is a great example of how block-booking, when not overdone, can be a good thing. The problem was, in classical Hollywood, they well for the overkill effect.