What is a Cult Movie?

What is a cult movie? You might think that an easy answer to question, but not all cult films are Z-grade, low-budget pieces of crap that cause grown men to dress in fishnet stockings. For instance, would you describe the holiday perennial It's a Wonderful Life as a cult film? Not now, of course, thanks to the wonderful laws of copyright in America that allowed this movie for a while to be reproduced and sold by any company that wanted to and aired by any local station in the world. What most fans of It's a Wonderful Life don't know is that the Jimmy Stewart classic was virtually ignored by audiences from its release until the 1980s. The big movie with a variation of the noun life in its title in 1946 was The Best Years of Our Lives, about the adjustments being made by soldiers returning home after World War II. Despite starring megastar Stewart and being directed by multi-Oscar winning director Frank Capra, It's a Wonderful Life was pretty much a box office bomb. For years it languished in late show hell until some very smart people realized that the copyright had lapsed without being renewed and the movie became a bargain bin tape. Including that vomitous colorized version that thankfully even Ted Turner now refuses to air. The most famous example of a classic that started as a cult movie, however, is probably The Wizard of Oz which just failed to capture the imagination of kids in those heady days between the end of the Depression and the attacks on Pearl Harbor.