Business Opportunities Weblog

Today in Entrepreneurial History: December 20

By on December 20, 2012 in History

It's a Wonderful Life

On this day in 1946 The popular Christmas film It’s a Wonderful Life is first released in New York City.

Why do I consider this to be a big deal in entrepreneurial history? It’s not because the film was a big money maker. It wasn’t:

Despite initially being considered a box office flop due to high production costs and stiff competition at the time of its release, the film has come to be regarded as a classic and is a staple of Christmas television around the world. Theatrically, the film’s break-even point was actually $6.3 million, approximately twice the production cost, a figure it never came close to achieving in its initial release. An appraisal in 2006 reported: “Although it was not the complete box-office failure that today everyone believes … it was initially a major disappointment and confirmed, at least to the studios, that Capra was no longer capable of turning out the populist features that made his films the must-see, money-making events they once were.”

It’s because someone at National Telefilm Associates forgot to renew the copyright in 1971 and now, film’s images are in the public domain. Just the images, though. The story is still copyrighted, though, because it is derivative work of the published story “The Greatest Gift”, whose copyright was properly renewed.

This lack of copyright opened the door for a number of interesting business opportunities over the years, including being the first feature-length movie released on CD-ROM, several years before DVDs became commonplace. In 1993, Kinesoft Development released the CD-ROM for Windows 3.1. The movie offered the opportunity to follow along with the shoot script side-by-side with the movie. The video also pushed the technological barriers of the time by being the longest running video of the time. Before the software updates Microsoft made to Windows 3.1 to accommodate the video, Windows was limited to about 15 minutes of video. It’s a Wonderful Life’s 130 minutes was quite a feat for a PC with a 486SX processor and only 8 MB of RAM!

Business Opportunities Weblog editor and publisher Dane Carlson lives in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, just 15 miles from Yosemite National Park. He accidentally became a professional blogger in 2001. He has added 12,198 posts to the site.

Another Idea: How to Start a Video Production Company Business

  • John Tedder

    Still my favorite Christmas movie Dane. What movies did it compete with at the time of its release? I would think that the people who saw it would recommend it to their friends and make it a big hit. I have probably seen it thirty times and never get tired of it! Merry Christmas everybody!

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