The Justice Department filed a motion Friday in a New York federal court to terminate the Paramount consent decrees, the 71-year-old rules that have restricted studio distributors’ control over exhibition.

If a judge approves the motion, it would clear the way for studios to once again take significant ownership of theater chains. But more importantly to exhibitors is the impact that it would have on a host of business practices that have been prohibited since the late 1940s.

The decrees prohibit such things as the practice of “block booking,” in which theaters have to take a package of movies in one license, and “circuit dealing,” or demanding a single license that covers all theaters in a circuit.

Under the DOJ’s plans, there would be a two-year sunset period on such a practice “to allow the theatre and motion picture industry to have an orderly transition to the new licensing changes.”

“The Paramount decrees long ago ended the horizontal conspiracy among movie companies in the 1930s and ‘40s and undid the effects of that conspiracy on the marketplace,” said Makan Delrahim, the chief of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, in a statement. “The Division has concluded that these decrees have served their purpose, and their continued existence may actually harm American consumers by standing in the way of innovative business models for the exhibition of America’s great creative films.”

Delrahim announced on Monday that the DOJ would move to terminate the decrees, put in place in 1948 after nearly a decade of litigation. The government’s lawsuit against the major studios led to a landmark Supreme Court decision that forced major studios to sell off their theater chains and signaled the “studio era” in the Golden Age of Hollywood.

Paramount, Fox, Universal, Columbia, Warner Bros., MGM and United Artists were bound by the decrees, as well as another studio, RKO, that no longer exists. Through the years, other studios, like The Walt Disney Co., have been wary entering the exhibition business, in part because of the fear of an antitrust challenge.