'The Shawshank Redemption' Turns 20: Looking Back on the Prison Movie's Surprising and Enduring Popularity
Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman in ‘The Shawshank Redemption’
Twenty years ago, on Oct. 14, 1994, Quentin Tarantino’s game-changer Pulp Fiction hit theaters. The same day also saw the wide release of a movie that — while overlooked at the time and grossing a fraction of Fiction's box office — might have had an arguably bigger impact among movie fans long term. It's a film that currently stands at the top of the IMDb’s user-voted Top 250 films — higher than The Godfather, The Empire Strikes Back, and yes, even Pulp Fiction. That movie? The Shawshank Redemption. How did a film initially ignored by so many people become such a phenomenon?
Frank Darabont’s directorial debut, which details the prison-yard friendship of wrongly convicted accountant Andy (Tim Robbins) and hardened lifer Red (Morgan Freeman), was greeted with reviews that were decent, but hardly the kind you’d expect for a classic-in-the-making. Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman, for instance, gave the film a B-, noting the “brazenly mechanical plotting and its wish-fulfillment finale.” Audiences were slow to catch on, with the film ultimately grossing only $28 million, a large chunk of which came only after the movie was nominated for seven Academy Awards including Best Picture. After it failed to win any Oscars, it wouldn’t have been surprising if Shawshank had faded as a respectable memory.
Yet by the time it was released on video in 1995, it proved an unlikely smash, one of the most popular video rentals of the year with more than 300,000 copies shipped. It later became a cable TV staple, with TNT airing it roughly every two months from 1997 onwards. Critic Andre Mouchard suggested that the film’s episodic structure, which follows Andy and Red through the years starting in the 1940s, actually helped it play particularly well on television: “Films like Shawshank… can deliver their punchy message every few minutes, not unlike network shows.”
The coming of the Internet age helped nurture the film’s fanbase. Even before Shawshank made it to cable TV, now-influential movie site IMDb had launched, and from its earliest days, the film was among the site’s favored titles. In the first recorded Top 250 movies list in April 1996, the film was No. 2 behind only Star Wars, and it has never dropped below fourth place in the years that followed. Since August 2008, it has held the top slot continuously, with nearly 1.3 million voters helping it to a huge score of 9.2 out of 10. (That’s even more impressive when you consider that it’s a statistically weighted number, with only the votes of ‘regular users’ of the site counting toward the ranking).
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That said, the film’s IMDb placing seems to be a symptom rather than a cause of its popularity. Though the site is now firmly part of the mainstream — one of the top 50 in the world according to the Alexa index — it was initially a small, cultish site for cinephiles, and that’s reflected in the votes that Shawshank has received. The film only reached 100,000 votes in 2003 and crossed the million mark this year, long after it became a phenomenon on home video and TV. The consistent high placing certainly helped the film's cult grow over the years, but it's likely a reflection of a popularity that was already in place.
How could a film that’s now this popular get off to such a slow start in the first place? In reality, it was always a tricky movie to market. In contrast with the years’ other big feel-good hit, Forrest Gump, it had a totally unknown director and was led by two actors who were familiar, but hardly big draws. Though Shawshank was based on a novella by horror writer Stephen King, it had no real genre elements, and it was both harsh (featuring among other things, prison rape and suicide) and sentimental.
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And yet it might be the very juxtaposition of those two elements that made it endure. The studio, Columbia Pictures, couldn’t find a way to sell the movie to audiences, perhaps because it wasn’t sure which audience to aim it at. But once the buzz caught on thanks to the Oscar nominations and the home-video release, viewers responded to that mix of hope and brutality. Shawshank was the weepie that it was OK for guys to like — it’s frequently cited as a movie that makes men cry and a recent Vanity Fair piece on the production described it as "a relationship movie for men." Its depiction of prison life was just sanitized enough — in comparison to, say, HBO’s brutal jail series Oz — that it didn’t alienate more sensitive audiences.
There are critical voices out there (such as, it should be said, this writer) who still remain skeptical of the film and who find it to be decent enough, certainly, but also overlong and occasionally mired in motivational-poster platitudes mistaken for profundity (“Fear can keep you prisoner: hope can set you free,” as the tagline read). Yet even for those of us a little baffled by the cult that’s grown around the film, there’s little doubt that by the time the film reaches its uplifting conclusion, with Andy and Red on an idyllic Mexican beach, it has earned it.
We’ve watched Andy and Red endure bitter hardships over 20 years of screen time and nearly two-and-a-half hours of real time, and their eventual victory feels hard won. Tim Robbins once described the film’s draw by saying that “although not everybody has been in jail, on a deeper, more metaphysical level, many people feel enslaved by their environment, their jobs, their relationships…. And Shawshank is a story about enduring and ultimately escaping from that imprisonment.” More than its home video success, or TNT airings, or IMDb status, it is Shawshank's simple, universal message that’s helped it become so beloved even 20 years on.
Watch The Shawshank Redemption's trailer:
