Double features, unless you're putting together your own by visiting multiple theatres, or are fortunate enough to reside in the vacinity of a revivial house, have mostly gone the way of the Edsel. Reports that people were leaving movie houses after the PLANET TERROR portion of GRINDHOUSE are easy to believe; youngsters nowadays don't know what a double feature is. Here's some good reading, courtesy of Sight and Sound:
Dream TicketsDream Tickets Part 2 I remember seeing a pretty significant number of people leave after "Planet Terror" when I saw Grindhouse.
One aspect of the death of the double feature that I especially lament is that it's really not commercially viable to release anything much shorter than 90 minutes (except possibly some very minor kids' movies). Some of my favorite movies are only about an hour long (Duck Soup and Freaks are a couple of examples that come to mind). I remember that Mark Kermode praised Werner Herzog's Wild Blue Yonder (which I thought was momentarily interesting but not really a success) for only being about 70 minutes and said that that's an ideal length for a movie. I think that he may have been at least partially right.
I watched Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr. and Laurel & Hardy's The Music Box on TCM last night, and it really made me wish that short 30-40 minute comedies where still commercially viable, at least through the mainstream movie distribution channels. It's possible that someone could make something similar for release on the internet or DVD, but I feel like comedies are really meant to be shared with an audience.
The great value of double features, at least as practiced at my neighborhood theaters, was the chance to discover films that you might not otherwise have seen or even heard of. How else would I have seen the British science fiction classic QUATERMASS AND THE PIT, if some local booker, keenly aware of his audience's tastes, hadn't chosen it, under its American release title, FIVE MILLION YEARS TO EARTH, from Fox's available offerings to pair with Fox's 'A' feature, THE GREAT WHITE HOPE, when it came to my neighborhood theater in the Bronx in early 1971? My first Italian western, THE UGLY ONES, starring Tomas Milian, was seen on a double bill with THE NIGHT THEY RAIDED MINSKY'S. Mario Bava's PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES was paired with THE ST. VALENTINE'S DAY MASSACRE.
Also, films we liked were booked with newer films regularly, which is how I got to see THE WILD BUNCH and M*A*S*H multiple times in 1970-72. And one or two repeat viewings of BUTCH CASSIDY and VANISHING POINT, among others.
This is also how I got to see older films that I'd missed when they were originally released. So I got to see Hawks' EL DORADO on a double bill with William Wyler's THE LIBERATION OF L.B. JONES; THE DIRTY DOZEN on a double bill with the southern racial drama ...TICK, TICK, TICK (starring two of the DOZEN cast, Jim Brown and George Kennedy); THE PROFESSIONALS on a triple bill with BLOOD OF DRACULA'S CASTLE and HALLS OF ANGER.
Not a bad way to catch up on films. Sure, the wait was longer than the wait for the DVD today, but nobody had told us about "instant gratification" yet. :P