Paramount had shown the film to a handful of theater company executives at its Los Angeles lot and elsewhere.
Movie studios increasingly tend to protect their biggest bets from advance showings. Two years ago, for instance, Sony Pictures screened “The Da Vinci Code” for critics at the Cannes Film Festival only two days before its opening in the United States. But exhibitors’ screenings can open a window for determined reviewers.
Such screenings are required in about two dozen states that have laws against blind-bidding, a practice in which theater owners were once asked to bid on films they had not seen.
As a practical matter, there is little or no actual bidding in the contemporary theater business, which relies instead on negotiations between distributors and theater owners. But distributors continue to hold screenings for theater company executives in the weeks before a film’s release, whether as a courtesy or as a way to avoid conflict with a patchwork of state laws.
Theater executives may have an incentive to play down a movie’s prospects after such a screening, to get better terms. In any case, many fans will most likely flock to “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” if only to make their own judgments about Mr. Spielberg’s decision to revisit the franchise fully 19 years after its last installment. Still, bad notices could keep the more ambivalent moviegoers from attending and thwart a truly huge box office haul.
