United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., 334 U.S. 131 (1948) (also known as the Hollywood Antitrust Case of 1948, the Paramount Case, or the Paramount Decision), was a landmark United States Supreme Court antitrust case that decided the fate of film studios owning their own theatres and holding exclusivity rights on which theatres would show their movies. It would also change the way Hollywood movies were produced, distributed, and exhibited. The Supreme Court affirmed the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York's ruling that the existing distribution scheme was in violation of United States antitrust law, which prohibits certain exclusive dealing arrangements. The decision created the Paramount Decree, a standard held by the United States Department of Justice that prevented film production companies from owning exhibition companies. The case is important both in American antitrust law and film history. In the former, it remains a landmark decision in vertical integration cases; in the latter, it is responsible for putting an end to the old Hollywood studio system. As part of a 2019 review of its ongoing decrees, the Department of Justice issued a two-year sunsetting notice for the Paramount Decree in August 2020, believing the antitrust restriction was no longer necessary as the old model could never be recreated in contemporary settings. Background The legal issues originated in the silent era, when the Federal Trade Commission began investigating film companies for potential violations under the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. The major film studios owned the theaters where their motion pictures were shown, either in partnerships or outright. Thus specific theater chains showed only the films produced by the studio that owned them. The studios created the films, had the writers, directors, producers and actors on staff (under contract), owned the film processing and laboratories, created the prints and distributed them through the theaters that they owned: In other words, the studios were vertically integrated, creating a de facto oligopoly. By 1945, the studios owned either partially or outright 17% of the theaters in the country, accounting for 45% of the film-rental revenue. Ultimately, this issue of the studios' then-alleged (and later upheld) illegal trade practices led to all the major movie studios being sued in 1938 by the U.S. Department of Justice. As the largest studio, Paramount Pictures was the primary defendant, but all of the other Big Five (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox,