To offer somewhat extra element, roadshows had been a typical launch format for studio “status” fare. It would not be till the mid-Nineteen Seventies that simultaneous nationwide releases grew to become frequent, and studios used to ship a restricted variety of prints out onto the world, opening in metropolis after metropolis, typically enjoying for months and even years. Roadshows, in contrast to their limited-release cities-only brethren, did not include B-features, cartoons, or shorts, and had been offered as a substitute as extra “theatrical.” Movies could be offered with intermissions, entr’actes, and exit music, and audiences could be handed applications and even tie-in merch. The studios did every thing they may to make sure movies really feel “large.”
However as acknowledged, that format solely labored for thus lengthy. After “Cleopatra” tanked — it was made for a bloated $31 million — roadshows had been over and carried out. Lifeless. Sadly for the studios, the success of “The Sound of Music” indicated that the pattern was again, they usually perked up. “The outdated mannequin will work once more? Let’s carry on investing,” they appeared to say.
(On an unrelated word, regulate what occurred in Hollywood after “Spider-Man: No Means Dwelling” was an enormous hit. The superhero style — as an ascendant Hollywood pattern — was useless, however just a few latter-day hits are going to idiot studios into continued overspending.)
And, wow, the spending! The late Nineteen Sixties noticed the discharge of many, many costly — and never very profitable — musicals from throughout all of the Hollywood studios. May a movie like Joshua Logan’s “Camelot,” based mostly on a Lerner & Lowe musical, be the subsequent “Sound of Music?” May Francis For Coppola’s “Finian’s Rainbow” with an growing old Fred Astaire be the one? May (yuck) Joshua Logan’s “Paint Your Wagon” be the one?
No, no, and no.