1920s Movie Palace Culture

Years later, other factors would contribute to the death of movie palace culture, but none would strike the decisive blow that the Great Depression did. By 1932, the Great Depression dropped movie attendance from 110 million attendees annually to 60 million attendees, and of the 18,715 theaters in America, 3,200 had already closed and 4,568 were about to close (Melnick 96). Large scale theaters and palaces that had been picked up in the aforementioned merger and vertical integration suffered as the companies that bought them went under and declared bankruptcy. The industry as a whole suffered, with the palaces taking the hardest hit, and, as it has been said before, it became terribly clear that Hollywood wasn’t “Depression-Proof.” Some may point out that the advent of television and drive-in theaters greatly detracted from movie theater attendance and may have continued to the death of the palaces, but these sources do not take the timeline of palace popularity into consideration. John Margolies subtly suggests in his documentation of movie distribution, Ticket to Paradise, that the advent of the drive in theater in 1933 was already a viable alternative to the palaces, but the reality was that drive-in theaters wouldn’t gain massive popularity until after the Second World War, at which point many movie palaces were already being demolished or purchased by other companies (21).
The palaces were a paradigm of wealth and aspired to do too much and be too grand. Consequently, their lavish expenses and careless spending would bankrupt them and send their once adoring patrons running in the opposite direction. Though the exhibitors and managers of the palaces did not and could not have foreseen the Depression, many had established debts via constructing such elaborate monuments that they prematurely turned their monuments into memorials and buried themselves in their own