Double bill

The double feature, also known as a double bill, was a motion picture industry phenomenon in which theatre managers would exhibit two films for the price of one, supplanting an earlier format in which one feature film and various short subject reels would be shown.

Opera houses staged two operas together for the sake of providing long performance for the audience. This was related to one-act or two-act short operas that were otherwise commercially hard to stage alone. A prominent example is the double-bill of Pagliacci with Cavalleria rusticana first staged on 22 December 1893 by the Met. The two operas have since been frequently performed as a double-bill, a pairing referred to in the operatic world colloquially as "Cav and Pag".

The term "double bill" was first used as a clever pun to describe the Buffalo Bill and Pawnee Bill Wild West Show. (For a short stint, Gordon William Lillie worked with William Frederick "Buffalo Bill" Cody as the Pawnee interpreter and later was dubbed "Pawnee Bill".) The two "Bills" in one show gave marketers a fun way to say, "for the price of one ticket, you get a 'double Bill'". This "double billing" lead way to movie theater owners, showing two movies to use the same term.

Later movie theaters, interested in attracting customers during the Great Depression, began changing the way they booked movies. Up until the 1960s, an evening at the cinema would often consist of the following:

Theater owners decided they could both attract more customers and save on costs if they offered two movies for the price of one. In the typical 1930s double bill, the screening began with a variety program consisting of trailers, a newsreel, a cartoon and/or a short film preceding a low-budget second feature (the B movie), followed by a short interlude. Afterward, the high-budget main feature (the A movie) ran. Although the double feature put many short comedy producers out of business, it was the primary source of revenue for smaller Hollywood studios, such as Republic and Monogram, that specialized in B movie production.

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