The increasing American presence in the British production sector and the decline of wholly British-financed production had far-reaching consequences for the film industry. It is a moot point, perhaps, whether there ever really was the ‘commercially viable British film industry’ that David Kingsley thought was about to emerge in the early 1960s or whether this was just a chimera. The success of British-financed films such as I’m All Right, Jack, Carry On Nurse and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning – all listed as major profit-makers by the National Film Finance Corporation at the turn of the decade – disguised the fact that most British films lost money. As the NFFC noted in its annual report for 1962: ‘The Corporation's profit for the year does not mean that British films are generally profitable, even with the aid of the levy. A few very successful films attract an exceptional amount of levy but many others saw a substantial loss.’ And British independent producers continued to experience difficulty in securing distribution guarantees – and therefore finance – for their films. Hal Chester, producer of the popular comedy School for Scoundrels (1960), for example, told the Kine: ‘You know how many times School for Scoundrels was turned down? Four times, that's how many. It took years to get that property off the ground.’

The decline of cinema admissions and the consequent contraction of the exhibition sector inevitably impacted upon the industry. The casualties in the early 1960s tended to be producers and distributors of supporting features, a mode of low-budget film-making that had now become an uneconomic anachronism. In January 1961, for example, Sapphire Films, which had produced The Adventures of Robin Hood and other telefilm series in the 1950s, went into receivership, and Walton Studios closed. Sapphire's Hannah Weinstein had ventured into low-budget feature production with the horror film City of the Dead (1960) in association with Max Rosenberg: it was a cheap affair (£44,965) but returned a distributor's gross of only £30,027.