Back in the 1960s and early 1970s, producers of series films such as Godzilla, Dracula, and Tarzan used to proclaim on their film posters that the latest pictures were "ALL NEW!" Presumably, they did this to tell audiences who had seen many of these films that this was one that they hadn't seen before and wasn't a re-release of an older film.
But other series from the same era -- James Bond, Planet of the Apes -- never felt the need to do this. And certainly the producers of today's series films -- Transformers; Saw; Fast and Furious -- see no need for this. It was an advertising practice that came and went in about a 15-year period. Nothing monumental about it. I just thought it was interesting.
Mr. DiMucci...I always love your posters and all that you have to say about them! THANK YOU so much for every one of your moments here at the FSM website!
Hammer Films (or perhaps more accurately, Warner Bros. and Universal-International) started using the "ALL NEW!" wording with their very first Frankenstein and Dracula films in 1957 and 1958.
Who said I didn't like it. As to why its use disappeared, my guess is that the surfeit of news about movies in the last three decades have made it impossible for a series film to fly under the radar. Everyone in the movie-going public knows what's coming next, and no one needs to be told what's NEW. But in the '60s and '70s, you probably didn't know what was going to play next at your local theater until you looked in the newspaper on Wednesday.
Wednesday used to be the day films generally turned over in U.S. theaters, probably because attendance was at its lowest point of the week. But when the weekend box office became so important to film studios, the day was changed to Friday. Does anyone know when Friday openings became the norm?
Sometime in the late seventies, I think, becoming the norm by the mid-eighties. Wasn't JAWS released on a Friday in hundreds of theatres across the country? That was 1975. I think that was the start.
