blockbooking of tickets

[Ono Seiko and Aaron Gerow]

Eija asked,

>Several people have previously written to this list about the habit of
>preselling movie tickets to various companies. When did this habit start?

Sano Shin'ichi in his _Nihon eiga wa, ima_ reports that while Kadokawa is 
usually credited with perfecting this system in the late 1980s, there 
were many similar cases going back into the late 1960s.  Nissan, which 
provided the cars for Yujiro's _Eiko e no 5000 kiro_ (1969) bought a lot 
of maeuri tickets for that, and Kansai Denryoku took over the 
distribution of a lot of tickets for Yujiro's _Kurobe no taiyo_ (1968).  
In the early days of tie-up films, buying of tickets was seen as 
legitimate advertising expenses, but in the case of Kobayashi Masaki's 
_Moeru aki_ (1978), funded by Mitsukoshi, the forced selling of tickets 
on Mitsukoshi business partners bordered on the illegal.  Glancing over 
my copy, it does not seem that Sano gives an indication of how much of 
the box office can be attributed to these practices, but he does note the 
statistic of what percentage of maeuri are actually used: in the worst 
cases, supposed box office hits had usage rates of less than 50%.

By the way, you should take care with the terminology.  Blockbooking 
specifically refers to the distributor practice of booking films in 
blocks (usually with the proviso that the theater agrees not to show 
films from other studios) and not to the practice of having corporate 
partners buy up advance tickets.

Aaron Gerow
YNU