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There are very few films that feel as tied to the holidays as Frank Capra’s ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’. Yet in 1946, audiences largely shrugged.
According to WRAL, the film lost $525,000 on release, and the losses helped take down Capra’s Liberty Films. It earned just above $21,000 on its initial release, and despite five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, it was unsuccessful at the box office and drew mixed reviews. It was also thoroughly trounced at the Oscars by “The Best Years of Our Lives.” Some studios came to see Capra as having lost his ability to make popular, profitable films. However, not everyone agreed with the notion.
How the Public Domain Turned It’s a Wonderful Life Into a Holiday Classic?
In 1974, because of a clerical error, National Telefilm Associates, which had inherited the rights, failed to renew the copyright, which essentially put the film in the public domain. TV programmers who were desperate for cheap content during slow December weeks realized they could air it for free. According to Looper, Roger Ebert later said the best and worst thing to happen to the film was landing in “the shadowy no-man’s-land of the public domain.”
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Luckily, Capra lived long enough to see the revival. “It’s the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen,” he said in 1984, per Time Magazine. His son Tom said the director “loved the fact it went into the public domain,” because the film became far more popular than it otherwise could have.
James Stewart, who called the picture his favorite, had sensed its TV appeal early. Capra felt the same way about it, and it was his favorite too. Back in 1956, Stewart said he thought the film was “very well adapted to TV” (per The Epoch Times).
Why It’s a Wonderful Life Still Airs Every Christmas?
In 1993, Republic Pictures claimed it still held rights to the original story, The Greatest Gift, which the screenplay was based on, and it also held the copyright to the film’s music. In 1994, it signed a long-term deal giving NBC exclusive broadcast rights, and the network usually airs the movie one to three times a year. The free-for-all was over, but the tradition it started stuck around. The American Film Institute now ranks the film at No. 20 on its list of the top 100 movies ever made.
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