The Block Booking of Films Reexamined

Block booking, banned by the U.S. Supreme Court, involves selling motion pictures as a package. The most generally accepted explanation for the practice is that it prevented exhibitors from “oversearching”—from rejecting films revealed ex post to be of below‐average value from an ex ante average‐valued package. This article examines the way in which block booking developed, the nature of the optimization problem, and the specifics of block‐booking contracts and finds little to support that hypothesis. Block booking emerged at a time when there was no oversearching problem, it was applied much more flexibly than a primary concern with oversearching would suggest, and exhibitors failed to make use of contractually permitted opportunities to behave in ways block booking was posited necessary to avoid. This article proposes instead that block booking was primarily intended to cheaply provide films in quantity, a claim made by movie producers of the time.