On this day in New York · December 20, 1946
It's a Wonderful Life Opens to a Shrug
The movie that now owns Christmas Eve in a million living rooms opened at a Times Square movie palace to so-so reviews and a box office that lost RKO money.
The facts
- Premiere
- December 20, 1946, at the Globe Theatre, 205 West 46th Street
- Box office
- RKO recorded a $525,000 loss on the film
- 1947 ranking
- Placed 26th among 1947 releases, with $3.3 million in box-office revenue
- Second life
- A 1974 clerical error let its copyright lapse, and free TV airings turned it into a Christmas broadcast staple by 1976
On December 20, 1946, Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life premiered at the Globe Theatre on West 46th Street, the Beaux-Arts movie palace known today as the Lunt-Fontanne. James Stewart played George Bailey, a Bedford Falls building-and-loan man talked back from the edge by his guardian angel, Clarence. New York critics were unmoved: Bosley Crowther in the New York Times knocked its sentimentality, while Time magazine called it one of Hollywood's best pictures of the year. Audiences split the difference and stayed home often enough that RKO ended up losing money on it. The film now treated as an American Christmas fixture opened, by the standards of that December, a disappointment.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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It's a Wonderful Life is a pretty wonderful movie. It has only one formidable rival (Goldwyn's The Best Years of Our Lives) as Hollywood's best picture of the year.
Time magazine, in its 1946 review
Source: Wikipedia -
the weakness of this picture, from this reviewer's point of view, is the sentimentality of it, its illusory concept of life.
Bosley Crowther, in his New York Times review
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
The Globe Theatre still stands on West 46th Street as the Lunt-Fontanne, a working Broadway house that once hosted the cold opening of a movie now watched every December by people who have never set foot in New York. The city's verdict that first night was not the one that stuck.
Sources
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