The process by which movies are made available to the public. It is one thing to have a good movie "in the can" and quite another to place that film into the best theaters, at the right time, for its optimal audience. From the very beginning of the film business, distribution has been the key to success.
In the earliest years of the 20th century, the businessman and inventor of moving pictures Thomas Edison nearly succeeded in monopolizing the burgeoning movie industry by controlling its distribution. Along with nine other major film companies, Edison formed the Motion Picture Patents Company in 1909, claiming that it alone had the legal right to make motion pictures. In turn, the Patents Company then created the General Film Company, which announced that any theater showing its films had to pay a licensing fee of $2 per week. According to Richard Griffith and Arthur Mayer in their wonderful book, The Movies, "The nickelodeon operators reacted to it much as the colonists of 1760 reacted to the Stamp Act." The independents, led by William Fox and Carl Laemmle, fought the Patents Company and its subsidiary, eventually defeating them by making their own movies in defiance of the patent laws and distributing them through the independent "exchanges" where films were rented. Later, in 1915, the Patent Company was finally defeated in the courts.
The exchanges proliferated, becoming the device through which films were routinely distributed. Producers sold their product to the middlemen at the exchange, who, in turn, rented the films to theaters. As the studio system solidified in the 1930s, the major film companies had little trouble with distribution because they also owned their own theater chains. Hollywood had become such a dominant force in moviemaking that films made outside the studios or in foreign countries had little appeal in America. Independent producers were no threat to the majors.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s everything began to change. The movie companies were forced to divest themselves of their theater chains; TV was making massive inroads into the moviegoing audience; and foreign films and independent producers began to fight for distribution. Because fees are particularly lucrative, distribution is the one area of the film business that rarely loses money (the distributor doesn't pay any of the usually enormous production costs, yet earns a percentage of the box-office gross). It is no wonder, then, that the major studios such as UNIVERSAL, WARNER BROS., and PARAMOUNT eventually became distributors for foreign films and the proliferating independents. Though their own film production has drastically diminished, the majors remain the preeminent distributors of motion pictures today.
The actual distribution process begins when the final prints of a film are offered to the distribution company, which, in turn, rents them to theater outlets. The distributor handles all the postproduction publicity, sets up the critics' screenings, and is usually responsible for deciding the release strategy for the film. The distribution company may also be involved in the selling of rights to cable TV, the home market, and so on, all in an attempt to fully exploit a movie's financial potential.
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