10 Films Cinemas Refused To Play (And Why)

3. Star Wars: The Last Jedi

The Last Jedi Luke Kylo
Lucasfilm/Disney

In most cases, Star Wars movies are guaranteed box-office hits - so it's pretty weird to learn that some cinemas turned down the chance of screening Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which went on to make over a billion dollars worldwide.

Disney is the most powerful entertainment brand on the planet, and it knows it. It knows that most cinemas pretty much rely on the likes of Star Wars, Marvel and Pixar to stay in business, meaning that the Mouse House holds all the cards when it comes to outlining deals with movie theatres.

And with The Last Jedi, the details of said deal turned a lot of small cinemas off. If a cinema wanted to screen the film, Disney was demanding 65% of all ticket revenue, one of the highest percentages a studio has ever asked for (the normal figure is closer to 55%). Cinemas were also required to put the film in their largest auditorium for at least four weeks, and if any of these rules were broken, the studio could enforce a 5% penalty, raising their take to a whopping 70%.

Because of these strict terms, a lot of theatres with only one screen - like northeast Iowa's Elkader Cinema - refused to play the film, because they couldn't rely on one movie to carry them all the way through the Christmas period.

Contributor
Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!