“The Wizard of Oz” made its Hollywood premiere at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on August 15, 1939. While the film had earnings of over $3 million in 1939 it really wasn’t profitable until its rerelease in 1949. The movie aired on TV for the first time in 1956.
The star-studded premiere on August 15th was a lavish, multi-million-dollar spectacle that marked the absolute peak of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s studio system dominance during the Golden Age of Hollywood. To bring L. Frank Baum’s fantasy world to life, the studio had authorized an unprecedented, highly risky budget that required custom-built Technicolor cameras, intricate special-effects rigs, and massive indoor soundstages that ran at blistering temperatures. Despite earning rave reviews and substantial box-office returns during its initial theatrical run, the film’s extreme production and marketing costs meant it technically operated at a financial loss for years, failing to generate a real profit for the studio until it was re-released to a brand-new post-war generation a decade later.
Image via Wikimedia Commons, no known copyright, public domain in the US
