The movie "Four Weddings and a Funeral" was released in the United States in 1994. The distributor, Polygram, had a limited P&A budget. They released the movie on a limited basis, in New York and Los Angeles. They spent heavily on advertising in these cities hoping the limited release would be a success. In this case it was and they used the profits to gradually release the movie all over the country. This is called a 'platform release'. It allows smaller movie studios to compete with the large P&A budgets of the big studios.