Frank Capra tried to change the game with Liberty Films, but faced challenges familiar to any mini-studio.
In 1946, director Frank Capra had an extra pep in his step. With World War II in the rearview mirror and shooting underway on his new movie It’s a Wonderful Life, Capra wanted to do a little boasting about the exciting future of Hollywood cinema. Per the Mark Harris book Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War, Capra penned a piece for The New York Times in which he predicted that audiences would soon notice a discernible change in the quality of Hollywood movies.
That kind of revenue is important because it only gets more and more expensive each year to make new theatrical movies. In 2015, Warner Bros. Pictures spent $30.6 million alone on TV commercials promoting Entourage: The Movie and another $39.3 million on commercials for the Liam Neeson action film Run All Night. Those are sizable costs before one dives into the amount of cash spent on other parts of the movie ad campaigns or the costs of the movies themselves.
With such hefty costs at its back, it’s no wonder the film failed to turn a profit in its initial theatrical release. That was deadly for Liberty Films, a company that desperately needed every single movie to be a hit right out of the gate. Instead, it now had to contend with the losses of It’s a Wonderful Life in addition to the ongoing struggles of getting a consistent slate of movies out to the public.
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