The yellow brick road was a bit bumpy when The Wizard of Oz first came out.
The 1939 classic has gone down in film history as one of the most iconic movies ever made, but its original performance at the box office was not so wonderful.
With a $2 million budget, The Wizard of Oz came was the most expensive movie MGM had ever made when it first came out, with final costs coming in at $2.7 million, according to the New York Times. It would take the movie nearly 20 years to make that money back.
Part of the reason the film lost money at first was due to the extremely low cost of tickets at the time, which weren't more than 25 cents and could go as low as 10 cents for juveniles — and more than half of its viewers were juvenile patrons, per the Los Angeles Times. As a result, the Wizard of Oz is estimated to have lost a whopping $1.14 million when it first released, which was an astronomical amount of money at the time.
But the film's box office performance wasn't representative of its critical acclaim or audience reception. In fact, The Wizard of Oz was nominated for six Oscars in 1940, including Best Picture, and won two awards for Best Original Song ("Somewhere Over the Rainbow") and Best Original Score.
View this post on InstagramThe Judy Garland-led film was later re-released in 1949 and 1955, by which time Garland was a bona fide star. Her performance as Dorothy Gale, alongside co-stars like Jack Haley, Bert Lahr, Ray Bolger, Margaret Hamilton and Frank Morgan — along with the film's revered soundtrack — eventually helped solidify The Wizard of Oz as a cultural phenomenon.
"The film’s all-American theme of solidarity, preservation of home and vanquishing of evil forces resonated with audiences in patriotic postwar 1949 and it recouped its initial losses and turned a profit," said William Stillman, co-author of The Wizardry of Oz: The Artistry and Magic of the 1939 MGM Classic, per the LA Times.
The Wizard of Oz has since been ranked among some of the best films of all time, earning a spot at No. 10 on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 Greatest American Movies of All Time.
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