Block Booking: Theatre scourge

In the early days of cinema block booking was the practice wherein the various studios...Biograph, Vitogrash, Lasky Famous Players, etc., would sell not a movie but a block therein to the various distributors...so if you wanted to see, say, Rags (1914) starring America's Sweetheart Mary Pickford then you also might get Shot to Rags, a movie so bad that I don't know if it ever actually existed and starring nobody. To get the "good" movies you also had to to purchase the complete crap...except...you could not purchase it and not show it...you had to purchase AND show it.
You see, some of the movies were unbelievably bad. There were production crews that often had as little direction as this: "Today we are going to make a western, so everyone wear Western clothes". An outline may or may not have been jotted down on whatever was at hand...a napkin was often the only "script". With a broadly outlined plot they might roll out in one or two rigs and film a movie. Now, occasionally this worked but then again...some real stinkers were made.
But the studios required the theatres to purchase AND SHOW this garbage in order to get the better movies. So whoever you sold your good ones to showed those...and made a profit, generally...and also showed the garbage at a loss. So the good movies subsidized the bad ones.
Of course, block booking led to monopolies...for example, if you purchased Biograph films they might include a clause that you could not show Pathe films. Thus every theatre that showed any given movie essentially had the exact same line-up as every other theatre showing that movie.
One would think the end of block booking would have brought forth some diversity. After all, now theatres can freely pick and choose whether they want to put a Warner Brothers Feature alongside a Metro Goldwyn Mayer alongside a Universal Artists (ironically, UA was one of the spearheads in ending the block booking as stars Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin despised that their superior films subsidized vastly inferior work) alongside an independent movie.
One would think wrongly. Look at the listings for any given area. If 4 different theatre chains could be found in that area each having 10 screens, at most you might have one or 2 different options. The only real choice is in what time you wish to go see it. Good thing we have choice now that block booking is gone...