Attendance at movies had plummeted over the previous two decades — in the early 1950s, movie theaters in the United States were already selling 34 million fewer tickets each week than they had only three years earlier — largely because of an upstart invention called television that provided viewers with more entertainment options, and made them available in the comfort of their homes. Looking for audiences, studios began making sprawling big-budget films, many of which dragged the studios down when they failed to take hold at the box office
