Cinerama Releasing Corporation

The name promised the impossible: a screen so wide it wrapped around your peripheral vision, three projectors stitching a single image, an audience lurching through a rollercoaster it never physically left. By the time Cinerama Releasing Corporation stamped that name on a distribution letterhead, the miracle was already dying. Here is the paradox of CRC — a company christened for the most immersive spectacle cinema had yet produced, which spent nearly its whole life quietly shipping other people's pictures to the nation's theaters, and ended not with a widescreen flourish but a liquidator's ledger.

The groundwork was laid in 1963, when William R. Forman, owner of the Pacific Theatres chain, seized control of the struggling Cinerama, Inc. — reportedly by buying up its debt from Prudential. The original three-strip Cinerama process, unveiled with This Is Cinerama in 1952, was a marvel and a commercial dead end: it demanded specially equipped theaters and never sustained a business in narrative films. Forman wanted more than a novelty projection system; he wanted a going concern. In 1966 he founded Cinerama Releasing Corporation as an independent distributor — a company to handle Cinerama's own widescreen productions, imported foreign films, and, crucially, the output of ABC Pictures, the film unit of the American Broadcasting Company.

The instant major

The gambit worked, at first, and spectacularly. Riding the ABC pipeline and a run of ambitious releases, CRC became what the trade press called an "instant major," reaching roughly a ten percent market share by 1970 without ever operating like a traditional studio. That was the model's genius and its flaw: CRC distributed but did not own. It rarely kept a copyright stake in the films it released, taking its cut for putting pictures on screens while the financing risk — and the underlying assets — sat elsewhere.

For a few years the slate was genuinely distinguished. CRC released Sydney Pollack's Depression-era marathon-dance nightmare They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969) and the 70mm disaster epic Krakatoa, East of Java (1969), a last gasp of the roadshow grandeur the Cinerama name evoked. It handled the lavish musical Song of Norway (1970), then swung hard into tougher, bloodier New Hollywood: Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1971) and Junior Bonner (1972), and the vigilante sensation Walking Tall (1973). It fed the era's horror appetite too, releasing anthology chillers from Britain's Amicus Productions. The through-line was a company grabbing in every direction — prestige, spectacle, exploitation — because it had no house style to protect.

The turn and the end

That reach was also the weakness. When ABC Pictures shut down its production arm in early 1973, CRC lost the steady supply that had made it a major and fell back on acquisitions, picking up finished, independently financed films to release. By August 1974 it had put out roughly 125 such acquired titles — but volume was not strength. A distributor with no library and no producing partner is a middleman without leverage, and the business steadily shrank.

A distributor that owns nothing owns nothing once the pipeline runs dry.

By 1975 CRC's distribution had effectively passed to American International Pictures, which took over releasing and catalogue management of the remaining titles. The parent, Cinerama, Inc., limped on until May 1978, when it entered liquidation under Forman. The Cinerama name itself — that grand, curved-screen brand — reverted to Forman's Pacific Theatres, surviving as a marquee rather than a studio.

Why does it still matter? Because CRC is a near-perfect illustration of its moment's business logic: the collapse of the roadshow spectacle, the brief window when a television network could bankroll a movie major, and the hard truth that in film distribution, whoever owns the negative outlasts whoever merely ships the reels. Its films endured — Peckinpah and Pollack are studied to this day — but the company that carried them to the screen dissolved, its catalogue folded into AIP and, in time, the larger mergers that swallowed AIP in turn. The screen was enormous. The company that bore its name proved anything but.