The ABC Sunday Night Movie is a television program that aired on Sunday nights, first for a brief time in 1962 under the title Hollywood Special (although Time magazine lists this version as The Sunday Night Movie). It then began airing regularly under its more commonly known title from 1964 to 1998, on ABC. From 2004 on, it has aired sporadically as a special program, now titled "ABC Sunday Movie of the Week".
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Encouraged by the ratings success on NBC's Saturday Night at the Movies, ABC initially purchased 15 United Artists films released in the late 1950s for its April 1962 premiere.[1] United Artists Television also provided some short featurettes promoting upcoming United Artists cinema releases to fill out some films that ended before the two hour time slot finished.
The program presented theatrical feature films airing on TV for the first time. The feature films were edited for content, to remove objectionable material, and for time - one such instance was the first network telecast of John Huston's 1956 film Moby Dick, a Warner Bros. film which runs 117 minutes uncut, and yet was shown in a two-hour time slot with commercials. In many cases, however, the broadcast was expanded from two to two-and-a-half hours to fit a film's longer running time, as in the two 1966 network telecasts of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel (not to be confused with the 1967 videotaped television adaptation of the musical, also broadcast by ABC). The first major network showing of Superman in 1982 was broadcast in two parts with previously unused footage. Extra footage was also added to the ABC broadcast of Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1983.
Because the concept of letterboxing films for television had not been introduced yet, the films shown were also pan-and-scanned so the image would fit the standard 4:3 television screen.
In 1972, ABC bought the broadcasting rights to the James Bond franchise (also by United Artists). The first film broadcast was Goldfinger. Unlike the British broadcasts of the James Bond films, the franchise was not presented in production order.
ABC made edits to the Bond films for violence, sexual content, and so that the films would fit in the time allotted, but perhaps the most controversial of these was the re-edit of the 1969 film On Her Majesty's Secret Service broadcast on the ABC Monday Night Movie.
ABC held the rights to the James Bond films until 1990, when The Living Daylights was the final film aired prior to Turner Broadcasting buying the TV rights to the franchise. The Bond films have also aired on several cable channels not owned by Turner. ABC broadcast the films again as a promotional tie-in when Die Another Day was in theaters in 2002, dubbed as The Bond Picture Show on Saturday nights.
Occasionally, The ABC Sunday Night Movie would telecast what they termed an ABC Sunday Movie Special, i.e. a film running three hours or more (counting the commercials). When the movie in question was a family film, the telecasts would begin at an earlier hour, so that the film would end at around 11:00 p.m, enabling younger viewers to watch without having to stay up too late. The Movie Specials invariably consisted of blockbusters, such as The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Robe, Oliver!, Patton, and The Ten Commandments. The last-named film continues its television career on ABC today, having become, like The Wizard of Oz, an annual television tradition. It is usually shown during the Palm Sunday or Easter weekend (The Robe, which made its TV debut in 1968, had been shown on Easter weekends by ABC prior to being sold to local television stations). The telecast of Patton, which took place in 1972, was remarkably mature, in that very little of the film's profanity was cut for television.
ABC would occasionally telecast Movie Specials on other days of the week as well, among them Fiddler on the Roof, and Godspell (which was shown on network television as a Thanksgiving season special in 1974).
The ABC Sunday Night Movie had a rather unusual method of presenting their films throughout the 1960s that movie series on other networks did not have. Except on rare occasions, such as the aforementioned Movie Specials, or films which already had a pre-credits sequence that led directly into the main title and so could not be altered, the opening credits or the title sequence of the particular film in question generally would not be shown until after the movie had ended. Instead, a teaser from the film was shown, whereupon an offscreen announcer (e.g. Joel Crager) would say the name of the film and its stars, and then the credit The ABC Sunday Night Movie would appear. A commercial would then follow, and when the program started up again, one would see the screenwriter and the director's names respectively - superimposed over the film's opening scene in credits manufactured by ABC. At film's end, another commercial would follow, after which, somewhat anti-climactically, the movie's actual title sequence, together with the studio logo, would then be presented, as if the film were starting up again.
The ABC Sunday Night Movie was also famous in the late 1970s for its theme music and brightly colored marquee. The opening has been parodied on the G4 network under the title Movies That Don't Suck.[2]
In order to give a moral justification for the violence of the film, Monte Hellman wrote and directed a 1974 prologue for A Fistful of Dollars featuring a prison warden (played by Harry Dean Stanton briefing an unseen man in Clint Eastwood's costume for the film on releasing him to stop two gangs.[3]
From 1968 to 1970, ABC ran a concurrent movie series on Wednesday nights, under the title The ABC Wednesday Night Movie.
A Tuesday night ABC Movie of the Week featuring only made-for-TV movies was added in 1969. The series was renamed Tuesday Movie of the Week and a Wednesday night Wednesday Movie of the Week, also presenting only made-for-TV films, was added in 1972. Both series continued until 1975.
From 1975 to 1983 (and again, briefly, in 1999) ABC ran a concurrent movie series on Friday nights, under the title The ABC Friday Night Movie.
Beginning in 1999, a Saturday night variant on the formula began, and has been somewhat of a ratings favorite. However, and more importantly nowadays, the ratings have varied from week to week. Since 1999, The ABC Saturday Night Movie has alternated with random repeats, The Wonderful World of Disney (up until 2008), and Saturday Night Football, which runs from the first Saturday in September, up into the first of December. Movies also alternate on various other nights of the week, for Sweeps and also as holiday-based programming, such as the annual pre-Easter telecast of The Ten Commandments.
For many years, until the early 1980s, the announcer for all of ABC's movie shows was network staff announcer Joel Crager. Afterwards, the duties would be handled first by Ernie Anderson, and then others.
The advent of such cable television networks as HBO, Cinemax, Showtime (which broadcast theatrical films on cable before they appeared on commercial television), along with the emergence of various home video formats, led to the decline of theatrical films regularly airing on network TV. Whereas one used to be able to see a theatrical film on prime time commercial network television every night of the week, this is now done only occasionally. Only cable networks exclusively devoted to films, such as American Movie Classics or Turner Classic Movies, show theatrical films in prime time every night; networks such as ABC, NBC and CBS no longer follow this practice, except perhaps on holidays.