In May 1977, so few American theater owners wanted to screen a science-fiction film called Star Wars that the studio had to bundle it with another film theaters actually wanted — and within a year, the movie no one in Hollywood expected to succeed became the highest-grossing movie in history

The most successful film franchise in the recorded history of American cinema opened in fewer theaters than essentially every other summer release of its year — and Fox had to force theaters to show it. The substantive industry consensus at the time of Star Wars’ May 1977 release was that the film was, at best, a modest niche product whose commercial prospects depended on attracting children and adolescent science-fiction enthusiasts during the early-summer window before the main theatrical releases of June and July. As reported in a Hollywood Reporter oral history with five film-distribution executives who were active theater-bookers during the original Star Wars release, the consensus among 1977 American theater owners was that Star Wars looked like “a kiddie movie.” The cast was substantially unknown. The director’s previous credits (THX 1138, American Graffiti) had not produced any indication that he could deliver a major commercial blockbuster. The 20th Century Fox marketing materials had not generated significant pre-release buzz. The science-fiction genre had not produced a major commercial hit in essentially the previous decade. And the standard industry practice of the period — blind bidding, in which theater chains had to commit to booking films before they had seen them — meant that the theater buyers responsible for stocking American multiplexes were making purchasing decisions based on substantially incomplete information about the films they were declining or accepting.

The Fox response to the substantial lack of theater interest in Star Wars was, in the strict legal terms of the 1948 Paramount Decree governing American film distribution, illegal. Block booking — the practice of forcing theaters to accept undesirable films as a condition of receiving desirable ones — had been formally prohibited by the United States Supreme Court in 1948 in United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., on antitrust grounds. The prohibition had not, in practice, been particularly well enforced across the subsequent three decades. As detailed in From Script to DVD’s detailed reconstruction of the original 1977 Star Wars distribution strategy, Fox’s Vice President of Domestic Distribution Peter Myers had recognised at an internal test screening approximately three months before the May 1977 release that Star Wars was likely to perform better than the industry was expecting. The available evidence from theater bookings, however, was that the film would not have sufficient screen access to reach the audience that Myers believed existed. The solution Fox adopted was to bundle Star Wars with The Other Side of Midnight — the Sidney Sheldon adaptation that theater owners actively wanted. If a theater wanted to book The Other Side of Midnight, the theater was required to also book Star Wars. The practice was illegal. Fox was eventually fined $25,000 by the Department of Justice for the block-booking violation — though, in the substantial historical irony that subsequent industry observers have repeatedly noted, the violation that triggered the fine was for forcing theaters to take The Other Side of Midnight, which by the time the fine was issued was the substantially less commercially viable half of the bundle.

What happened in the 32 theaters

The Star Wars opening on Wednesday 25 May 1977 produced commercial results that, by every available industry metric, no one in 1977 American film distribution had anticipated. As described in Looper’s reconstruction of the original Star Wars theatrical experience, the 32 theaters where the film opened reported queues extending around city blocks before the first matinee showings began. The opening-day box office across the 32 venues was approximately $250,000 — a per-screen average of roughly $7,800 in a single day, at a time when the standard industry benchmark for a successful per-screen opening day was approximately $3,000 to $5,000. The Coronet Theatre in San Francisco reported continuous lines from the opening matinee through the late-evening final showings. The Mann’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, which had reluctantly accepted Star Wars on a two-week booking before its previously-committed William Friedkin film Sorcerer was scheduled to take over the screen, found that the lines for Star Wars extended for the entire two weeks and continued building. News helicopters hovered above the Hollywood Boulevard queues. The opening-weekend total across the 32 theaters reached approximately $1.5 million — a per-screen average that, in the industry analysis of the period, was several multiples higher than any contemporary release.

The substantive problem Fox faced in the days following the opening was that the film was generating substantially more demand than the available theater count could accommodate. Fox’s distribution team began urgent calls to theater chains across the country that had previously declined the bundle, expanding the print order from 32 to 43 by the end of the opening week, to several hundred theaters within the subsequent month, and to approximately 1,750 theaters by the end of the summer. Approximately 60 theaters played Star Wars continuously for more than a year — an exhibition pattern that, in the post-1970s era of weekly-cycling Hollywood releases, no subsequent film has matched. The Mann’s Chinese Theatre, having been forced to give up Star Wars for the previously-committed Sorcerer in late June, watched Sorcerer flop within two weeks and arranged a renovated alternative theater two blocks away to continue showing Star Wars until the Chinese could re-book it on 3 August 1977 — the first time in the theatre’s 50-year history that a film had returned for a second first-run engagement at the venue.

The 12 months that followed

The cumulative trajectory across the subsequent twelve months reshaped essentially every assumption the American film industry had previously held about commercial cinema. Per MovieWeb’s reconstruction of the broader cultural and commercial impact of the Star Wars launch, the film grossed approximately $307 million domestically and $410 million worldwide during its initial 1977-78 theatrical run — surpassing Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) to become the highest-grossing film in recorded American box-office history, a position Star Wars would hold until E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in 1982. The Time magazine cover of 30 May 1977 — issued just five days after the opening — declared Star Wars the “Movie of the Year” in a context where the film had been in commercial release for less than a week. Carrie Fisher, the 20-year-old actress who had played Princess Leia, subsequently described the cultural response to the film’s release as “less like a movie opening and more like an earthquake.” George Lucas, who had negotiated for himself a deal in which he had given up most of his directing fee in exchange for the merchandising and sequel rights — rights that 20th Century Fox had not considered particularly valuable at the time the contract was signed — became, across the subsequent two decades, one of the wealthiest individuals in the recorded history of the American entertainment industry.

The Other Side of Midnight, the Fox prestige release with which Star Wars had been bundled and which Fox had originally considered the more commercially important of the two films, grossed approximately $26 million during its 1977 theatrical run — a respectable showing for a romance picture but substantially less than Fox had been expecting and approximately one-twelfth of the Star Wars total it had been used as leverage to distribute. The Sidney Sheldon adaptation has not, in the 48 years since its release, been the subject of any commercial reissue, major retrospective, sequel, or cultural reassessment, and has receded almost entirely from popular memory. The five distribution executives interviewed by The Hollywood Reporter in 2015 — film buyers who had been involved in the original 1977 theater bookings, who had spent the subsequent four decades watching the consequences of their individual decisions to accept or decline the original Star Wars bundle, and who had, in several cases, watched colleagues become major Hollywood figures or fade from the industry on the basis of how they had handled this single 1977 distribution decision — were essentially unanimous in their retrospective assessment that the substantive lesson of the original Star Wars release was that no one, including the studio that produced it, the theaters that initially declined it, the critics who initially dismissed it, and the broader film industry that had spent the previous decade producing substantially more sophisticated films than the space opera Lucas had delivered, had any reliable way of predicting what audiences were actually going to want to see. The film whose 32-theater Memorial Day release in 1977 had required Fox to bundle it with another film theaters actually wanted had, within twelve months, become the most commercially successful film in the recorded history of American cinema.