Roadshow theatrical release

A roadshow theatrical release (known also as reserved seat engagement) was a term in the motion picture industry for a practice in which a film opened in a limited number of theaters in large cities like New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and other major cities around the world for a specific period of time before the nationwide general release. Although variants of roadshow releases occasionally still exist, the practice mostly ended in the early 1970s.

As far as is known, virtually all of the films given roadshow releases were subsequently distributed to regular movie theatres. This was called a general release, and was akin to the modern-day wide release of a film. However, there are five important differences between a roadshow presentation of a film and today's limited releases:

The roadshow format had been used since the days of silent films, but the rise of widescreen and stereophonic sound in the 1950s made it especially attractive to studio executives, who hoped to lure audiences away from television by presenting films in a way that an audience at that time could never hope to see at home. Possibly, the first film ever shown in a roadshow engagement was the French film Les Amours de la reine Elisabeth in America in 1912, a 53-minute motion picture which starred the legendary stage actress Sarah Bernhardt. Films shown in roadshow format before 1951 included silent epics such as The Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916), The Covered Wagon (1923), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), The Ten Commandments (1923), Ben-Hur (1925), The Big Parade (1925), and other films, such as the first Oscar winner Wings (1927), the very first feature length part-talkie The Jazz Singer (1927), the silent film Chicago (1927) (based on the play that inspired the Kander and Ebb Broadway musical and Oscar-winning film), Show Boat (1929) (a part-talkie based not on the 1927 stage musical but on Edna Ferber's original novel from which the musical was adapted), The Desert Song (1929), Rio Rita (also 1929), Howard Hughes's World War I drama Hell's Angels (1930), Cecil B. DeMille's The Sign of the Cross (1932), the all-star Oscar-winning Grand Hotel (1932), the Oscar-winning biopic The Great Ziegfeld (1936), the fictionalized historical epic about the great Chicago fire In Old Chicago (1937), the classic films Lost Horizon (1937), Gone with the Wind (1939), Fantasia (1940), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943) and The Song of Bernadette (1943), the 1943 wartime musical revue This Is the Army (shown in roadshow format only in its initial run), the wartime tear-jerker Since You Went Away (1944), Samuel Goldwyn's Oscar-winning postwar epic The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), the flamboyant Western Duel in the Sun (also 1946), the O'Neill adaptation Mourning Becomes Electra (1947), the biopic-spectacle Joan of Arc starring Ingrid Bergman (1948), and DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949). British films that were shown as roadshow attractions included the Olivier Shakespeare adaptations Henry V (1944 in England and 1946 in the U.S.) and Hamlet (1948), as well as the ballet film The Red Shoes (1948). Warner Brothers' A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935), the first sound film version of the Shakespeare play, was also given a roadshow release, as was the 1951 religious epic Quo Vadis. However, the theatre exhibitors of Quo Vadis took the unusual step of opening the film in two New York theatres simultaneously, where it was shown in roadshow format in one theatre, while the other one ran the nearly three-hour film in the more conventional, "continuous performances" manner.

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