To many of our readers, 'It's A Wonderful' life will be considered the quintessential Christmas movie, so it might come as a surprise to hear that it completely wrecked the company who made it at the time of its original release. It's become a classic years later, thanks to re-screenings of the movie and the joy of DVDs and streaming, but life was anything but wonderful for Liberty Films back then.
If anyone should shoulder the blame for the box office failure of the film, it's Liberty Films themselves. For reasons that will never make sense to anybody, they decided the best time of year to release their heartwarming Christmas tale was July. Predictably, cinema-goers didn't want to see Christmas films at the height of summer, so they didn't go. Liberty, who'd spent big on the production, recovered less than half their costs. That wasn't enough for them to carry on trading.