in
Melbourne, Australia has shown double features since its opening in 1936 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. In 1948, the
U.S. Supreme Court decided that the practice was illegal in
United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., contributing to the end of the
studio system. Without block booking, the studios did not have an incentive to make their own B-features again. But audiences at first-run
movie palaces,
neighborhood theatres, and
drive-in theaters, 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 re-releasing older films such as
Realart and
Astor Pictures, • a low-budget feature contracted from a smaller studio. horror films,
I Was a Teenage Frankenstein and
Blood of Dracula James H. Nicholson and
Samuel Z. Arkoff formed
American International Pictures in the mid-1950s to produce and distribute low-budget features. 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, with each picture given equal billing in the advertising and backed up with an explosive advertising campaign, theaters were willing to exhibit them 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 advertisements 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 mostly left 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 series in the
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 11:00 AM and ran the program without breaks until 12:00 midnight. Customers bought tickets and entered the theater at any time during the program.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show and its 1973 stage predecessor
The Rocky Horror Show reference the practice in their opening song "Science Fiction/Double Feature" and are largely inspired by B-movies presented in these showings. The movie itself was and still is often shown as a double feature with
Shock Treatment, a loose follow-up by the same directors. While most cinemas have long discontinued the practice of showing double features, it has nostalgic appeal. The
Astor Theatre in
St. Kilda,
Melbourne,
Australia, established in 1936, continues the tradition of the double feature to this day. Many
repertory houses continue to show two films, usually related in some way, back to back. 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. In summer 1989, Paramount's
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade were re-released to theaters as a double bill in response to
Star Trek V′s individual box office performance. During the 1990s, many
videotapes that contained two films on the same tape (with the second often a sequel to the first) were described as "double features," a practice that was later extended to
DVDs. == The 21st century years ==