By 1945 it operated over 400 cinemas (usually called the Savoy or Regal) and was second only to Rank's Odeon and Gaumont chains. By the close of the 1950s ABC had started rebranding most cinemas as ABC and dropped names like Regal. Uk exhibition was characterised by alignments between distributors and exhibitors. ABC had access to Warner Brothers, MGM and its own ABPC productions, whereas rival Rank had 20th Century Fox, Paramount, Walt Disney, Columbia, Universal, United Artists and its own productions. Rival ABC, Odeon and Gaumont cinemas in a town showed their own releases and barred each other from showing the same film.