George Lucas Museum of Narrative Art the Lion King National Film Registery

The Panthera leo Rex 3D has been surprising box part prognosticators. Image courtesy of Disney

Leading the box-office for ii weeks in a row, The Lion King 3D left motion picture pundits shaking their heads. The rerelease of a 17-year-quondam film, albeit 1 converted to 3D, has already grossed over $60 million, a "remarkable" achievement according to Multifariousness. But given the weak competition, and the fact that Disney insisted on 3D screenings with higher ticket prices, maybe it'southward non that surprising that The Lion King 3D did then well. In some ways it was merely following a formula ready out years earlier by Walt and Roy Disney.

Rereleases take ever played an of import function in movies. In the early days, when bootlegging and piracy were rife, exhibitors would supply whatever titles they wanted to the movies they showed. The rise of moving picture stars like Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin gave distributors the opportunity to capitalize on their before work. William Play a trick on, the head of a moving-picture show company that would somewhen become Twentieth Century Play a joke on, was something of an expert at repackaging his studio's cloth. In 1918, while the country was still in the grips of a deadly flu epidemic, Pull a fast one on began reissuing films from as early equally 1915. He continued the practice in 1919 and 1920, this time giving his old films new titles. 1916′southward The Love Thief became 1920′s The She Tiger. (A few years later the New York State Superior Court ruled the practise illegal.)

In 1928, Harold Franklin, president of Due west Coast Theatres, Inc., split the approximately twenty,000 movie screens in the Usa into 9 categories, including 3rd-, fourth- and fifth-run houses. Each level charged a different price to see movies, and then if you lot didn't desire to pay first-run prices, you could look until a film reached a lower-tier theater. By that time the practice of rereleasing films had become established among studios. If a hit title could still make money, why not bear witness it again? And if a new film didn't practice especially well at the box-office, a studio could replace information technology with one that already did.

When the industry switched to sound, studios re-released onetime titles with new soundtracks. Some films, like Universal's Lonesome, were rereleased with added dialogue scenes. The Phantom of the Opera was rereleased several times. When Lon Chaney, the star, refused to participate in a sound upgrade, editors had to restructure the story for the new version to make sense. (In fact, the original 1925 release no longer exists.)

William South. Hart released a sound version of his silent Western Tumbleweeds; D.W. Griffith offered a sound version of The Nascency of a Nation. Chaplin rereleased his silent features throughout the 1930s and 1940s, adding a score, sound effects, and an intrusive narration to the 1924 1925 championship The Gold Rush.

When stars moved from one studio to some other (like the Marx Brothers switching from Paramount to MGM), it was the perfect excuse to bring back old titles to piggyback onto new publicity. John Wayne's low-budget B-Westerns suddenly showed upward in theaters once again after he became a big-budget star.

Tightened censorship standards in 1934 (via the wide adoption of the newly-strengthened Product Code) had a marked bear on on rereleases. 1932′s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde lost xv minutes when it was reissued. Thelma Todd'due south "college widow" scene in the Marx Brothers' Horsefeathers (originally 1932) was torn to shreds. The drowning of a little girl was excised when Universal tried to rerelease Frankenstein in 1937. (Some of the cloth was establish in a British print and restored in the 1980s, simply the scene is all the same missing its close-ups.)

Frankenstein ended up on a double-bill with Dracula for a 1938 rerelease. After it reissued most of its monster films, Universal licensed them in 1948 to a company called Realart Pictures. Like Film Classics, Realart distributed older titles throughout the country.

When Paramount reissued 1930′south Morocco with Marlene Dietrich in 1936, it was on a bill with two older Walt Disney cartoons. Disney was always very canny about his titles. Maybe apocryphally, he has been credited with the "vii-year rule," in which his features would be shown again in theaters every seven years in club to capitalize on a new audience of youngsters. Bambi earned $i.2 million in 1942; $900,000 in 1948; and $2.7 1000000 in 1957.

Obviously, seven years wasn't a difficult-and-fast rule, specially after the arrival of boob tube and dwelling house video. Merely the Disney studio has been very protective of its hits because it realizes they however have the ability to make money. As a corollary to the rule, the studio "retires" titles, making them unavailable for a set menses before reissuing them in "new" "deluxe" editions, equally information technology did with Fantasia, Sleeping Beauty, Pinocchio, and just this month Dumbo. (Disney Vault tries to keep rail of what is and isn't in print.)

I learned a lot virtually classic film through the non-theatrical market. In 1912, Pathé Picture introduced 28mm motion-picture show stock, which was targeted for home consumers. Labs would brand "cutting-downward" versions of features on 28mm (and later on 9.5mm and 16mm stock) which could be purchased to prove at abode. (In some cases these cutting-downward versions are all that remain of features.) By the 1960s two companies dominated the dwelling or market, Blackhawk and Swank. They would not simply sell prints, they would rent them to non-theatrical venues, mostly colleges but likewise churches and non-profit organizations. (A black church shows a Disney drawing to prison inmates in the great Preston Sturges one-act Sullivan'south Travels.)

Really shrewd filmmakers who kept control over their titles could then oversee rereleases of their movies. Hitchcock was a genius at this, putting out titles like Rear Window whenever he felt in that location was a market for them. In the 1960s and 1970s, Warner Bros. and MGM adult an entire line of rereleases, the former with Humphrey Bogart movies, for example, and the latter, the Marx Brothers and Greta Garbo. Raymond Rohauer did the same with Buster Keaton's shorts and features.

It would be nice to remember these distributors were trying to introduce classic movies to a new audition, but they were really only trying to wring a few actress tickets out of films that had been given upwardly for expressionless. Speaking of death, a star's demise is the perfect opportunity to re-release films. James Dean and Marilyn Monroe were barely cached when their films were hit the theaters again.

Rereleases continue to this solar day. Francis Ford Coppola keeps tinkering with The Godfather, offering different versions and packages of all the films in the series. Ditto with Steven Spielberg and his Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Even before George Lucas started altering Star Wars, it had been re-issued iv times within the offset v years of its original 1977 release. James Cameron put out an extended version of Avatar, and is releasing a 3D version of Titanic on Apr 6, 2012. To date there have been seven dissimilar versions of Blade Runner.

The reissue strategy isn't express to movies. How many pop stars have repurposed their fabric by releasing "remixes" or "extended versions" of hit songs and albums? The next time y'all plow on your television and find nothing but reruns, yous have, amid others, William Flim-flam and Walt Disney to thank.

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Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/playing-it-again-the-big-business-of-re-releases-91218814/

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