Studio executives never imagined A Christmas Story would be such a success. The 1983 film, which centers on a series of misfortunes falling upon a nine-year-old boy named Ralphie (Peter Billingsley), lacks the usual sentimentality of a holiday hit. It may have the nostalgic quality of being set in the 1940s, but it was not particularly warm or fuzzy.
That might be why director Bob Clark spent over a decade trying to convince Hollywood to help him make the film. He had developed the script alongside writer Jean Shepherd (who would narrate the film as adult Ralphie), but producers weren’t interested.
It wasn’t until Clark’s 1981 film Porky’s became a smash hit that studios started taking A Christmas Story seriously. Porky’s might not seem like it’d make a persuasive case for the film — it’s a raunchy high school sex comedy with zero Christmas vibes at all — but its success was all the evidence studios needed. Porky’s grossed over 160 million worldwide on a roughly $5 million budget.
Clark told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that studio executives “would laugh at me” whenever he’d pitch A Christmas Story to them before 1981. He added, “After Porky’s, they didn’t laugh any more.”
Despite ‘Porky’s’ Success, ‘A Christmas Story’ Was Not an Instant Hit
As passionate as Bob Clark was about bringing A Christmas Story to life, there was a period after its initial release where the studios’ skepticism seemed proven correct.
It opened the weekend before Thanksgiving to only around $2 million. It was dropped from most theaters before Christmas even arrived, only earning around $13 million total in its original run.
It was only the next year when the movie released on home video that the film seemed to pick up some genuine popularity. Even then, the movie didn’t truly take off as an official holiday classic until TNT started running 24-hour marathons of it in 1997. (The marathons moved to TBS in 2004.) From that point on, the tongue-on-the-pole scene was forever ingrained in the public consciousness.
Much like the slow-building popularity of It’s a Wonderful Life before it or The Shawshank Redemption after it, A Christmas Story is the perfect example of how box office earnings are not the only metric of a movie’s success. It doesn’t matter what viewers think of a movie on day one; the true test is how they think about it decades down the line.
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